Evaluation of a commercial AdvancedTCA board management controller solution (IPMC)

The MicroTCA (MTCA) and AdvancedTCA (ATCA) industry standards have been selected as the hardware platform for the upgrade of the electronic systems of some of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) . In this context, the electronics support group for experiments at CERN is running a project to perform technical evaluations of MTCA and ATCA equipment. As part of this activity, a commercial solution for an Intelligent Platform Management Controller (IPMC), an essential component of any ATCA blade design, is being evaluated. We validated the supported IPMC features, checked the interoperability and adapted the reference design for use on an existing ATCA carrier board.