MTCA control and data acquisition platform for Plasma Diagnostics

The Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) instrumentation platform for fusion control and diagnostics developed at IST, is being extended with a Micro Telecommunications Computing Architecture (MTCA) control and data acquisition platform, still able to maintain performance characteristics in speed, channel density and availability of ATCA, at a cost suitable for smaller systems. Software and firmware have been ported to MTCA using mostly in-house developed hardware, preserving many of ATCA's benefits in performance in a smaller form-factor. The first instance of the proposed platform comprises a MTCA 1U shelf with 6 Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) slots, MTCA Carrier Hub (MCH) module, AMC to Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Mezzanine Card (FMC) carrier modules, 500 MSPS to 2 GSPS ADC FMC modules, timing and synchronization input/output (IO) module, or other Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) modules. Data is handled by the MCH, featuring PCIe Gen 3 switching to a host computer, as well as performing clock distribution and Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) based hardware management for high availability. This compact, flexible and autonomous or scalable platform may either integrate a large-experiment system infrastructure, as well as being configured as a lower-cost, self-contained platform for smaller experiments or development and testbench purposes. The focus of this paper is the development of the MCH MTCA.0 module, which is key to introduce the platform architecture.