Lower costs, scalability on wish list at Bus & Board conference

Lower costs, scalability on wish list at Bus & Board conference
Performance still remains at the top of every system designer's agenda at this week's Bus and Board conference in Long Beach, Calif. But the downturn in the economy and the bursting of the telecom/networking bubble have also pushed scalability, low cost and flexibility close to the top of everyone's "wish list."

Dan Moore, president of the communications and enterprise group at SBS Technologies Inc. (Carlsbad, Calif.), said that there are two questions that companies are facing: What can they do to take advantage of the still modestly growing opportunities in segments outside of telecom and networking? And how do they prepare for the turnaround in the telecom/networking market when it comes, in terms of new technologies, architectures and design methodologies? "I think everyone understands, though, that when the telecom/networking market does start growing again, it will be a long time, if ever, [before] it will reach the heights that we experienced in the last few years before the fall," he said.

"It is no longer just a case of performance, performance, performance at any cost," said Yves Desrochers, director of hardware design at Kontron Ltd. (Quebec). "It is now performance at the best possible cost, designs which are capable of top performance but which are scalable across a broad range of end-system throughput requirements, which are scalable incrementally and which are flexible enough to be used across a broader range of markets."

While telecom and networking still remain at the top of the list, Desrochers said, bus and board makers are looking at how their designs can be adapted to the requirements of other market segments that still remain relatively stable and growing, such as industrial, military/aerospace and even medical equipment.

"It is amazing how attractive such mundane, traditional but stable and modestly growing markets now look to companies caught in precipitous and sudden downturn in the telecom/networking marketplace," said Justin Moll, marketing manager at Bustronic, Elma Americas Inc. (Fremont, Calif.), in his article in this week's In Focus.

A lot of attention, however, is still being focused on next-generation switch-fabric technologies, said Desrochers, because developers know that existing shared-bus architectures such as VME and CompactPCI have fundamental limitations and are topping out in performance and throughput. In that context, he said, designers are looking at how to squeeze more performance out of VME and CompactPCI before making the transition. "And in their analysis of various switch-fabric alternatives, developers seem to be placing a lot of attention on the ones that offer the easiest and least-disruptive method of transitioning to the new interconnect methodologies," he said.

According to SBS Technologies' Moore, such commonly used mezzanine buses and cards as IndustryPack, PCI Mezzanine Card and PCMIP are getting a second look in many high-end, high-performance networking and telecom applications as a way to add performance incrementally and in a more cost-effective way.

"While many mainstream networking and Internet equipment vendors have in the past rejected mezzanines because of the additional cost they add to a system," Moore said, they are getting a second look because it is clear that over the long term they do reduce costs without necessarily sacrificing performance. "Mezzanines do add somewhat to the cost and complexity of system boards, but they also provide insurance against obsolescence." Also, he said, more-subtle system cost considerations make mezzanine buses and modular design approaches much more attractive, including such things as reduced floor space and support requirements, shorter development cycles and more flexibility in making smaller, incremental system improvements.

Given the shift from "performance at all costs" to "performance at the best possible cost," promoters and builders of the new generation of switched-fabric alternatives are emphasizing those aspects of their methodologies as strenuously as they do performance. Contributor Tim Miller, who is president of the StarFabric Trade Association and vice president of marketing and sales at StarGen Inc. (Marlborough, Mass.), said this is because time-to-market considerations and development budget constraints are ever-present, forcing high levels of both hardware and software investment reuse.

A switched-fabric interconnect architecture like StarFabric/AS, he said, which is scalable and highly available and can support multiple types and classes of traffic, is applicable across many industries and applications. Relevant areas include communication equipment, servers and storage systems, medical imaging systems, industrial control and automation, video and image processing, scientific computing and automated test equipment. "Its applicability across this range of applications helps drive volume up and cost down," he said.

Assessing fabrics

When costs are being considered, Miller said, it is important to take a broader look when assessing interconnect fabrics such as StarFabric/AS and factor in such parameters as the ability to scale, high availability and the support for multiple types and classes of traffic. "Another set of parameters that must also be factored in revolves around the interconnect's transparency, which, in an ideal system, would be completely transparent." Such transparency, he said, has four main parameters: cost, power, board space and protocol overhead. "System designers must select the interconnect architecture that balances these four intertwined dimensions," he said.

In promoting an alternative switch fabric, HyperTransport (HT), Brian Holden strikes a similar cost/performance note in his article. Holden is principal engineer at PMC-Sierra Inc.'s MIPS Processor Division (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Technical Working Group chair of the HyperTransport Consortium.

"HyperTransport links enable high-speed data movement throughout the system, a key attribute for a network router that is constantly moving thousands of data packets from network I/O channels to system memory through specialized functional units and back to the network," he said. "Additionally, by using standard HT components, the system cost is lower because of the benefits of scale of the high-volume HT-enabled components and because HT eliminates the need for multitiered bus structures within the subsystem." The lower cost of manufacturing is also a plus because margins, said Holden, even in high-end equipment, are always under pressure.

Bustronics' Moll believes the best bet for maintaining the balancing act between performance and cost in the high-throughput telecom and networking segment is a shift to a platform that is standards-based. The platform should be developed from the ground up with an understanding of the high-level system requirements for enabling management automation and with a standard set of programming interfaces. "Such an interface would allow reuse of both the platform hardware building blocks and system software building blocks." The best bet for that kind of platform, in the CPCI space at least, he said, is the AdvancedTCA architecture being announced this week at the Bus and Board Conference.

Ironically, SBS Technologies' Dan Moore believes the drive within the embedded-networking market toward "platformization" may have achieved its biggest boost precisely because of the downturn in the economy and in the telecom space. "The economic constraints imposed on all of us have forced everyone to pay much more attention to a standards-based market rather than a number of competing proprietary specs as the way to achieve a sustainable, high-growth environment without the precipitous boom-and-bust cycles."

According to contributor Venkataraman Prasannan, senior director of marketing at RadiSys Corp. (Beaverton, Ore.), selecting the appropriate bus and board architecture for a specific compute platform architecture has always been more of an art than science. And the trade-offs are likely to become even more complex in the new environment. This will be especially true as modular platform concepts take root and standard architectures evolve, allowing customers to choose off-the-shelf platforms that meet different application requirements.

"Industry groups such as the PICMG and SA [Service Availability] Forum are working hard to create standards that promote high reuse and economy of scale," he said. And as AdvancedTCA hype intensifies in the market, engineers and architects will have to revisit their time-tested methods of choosing when, what and how to move to yet another new architecture.

"While they have been doing this time and again [starting from proprietary to PCI, PCI to CompactPCI, CompactPCI to switch-fabric CompactPCI and most recently CompactPCI to AdvancedTCA], there are no easy formulas or objective ways to choose this migration, said Prasannan. "However, in today's 'do more with less' and 'spend only when absolutely necessary' environment, customers are not very forgiving when it comes to 'forklift upgrades,' " he emphasized. "The investment must have a reasonable payoff."