Kontron’s new high-performance MicroTCA™ Carrier Hub family supports four different high speed fabrics

Kontron AM4904 / AM4910 MCHs provide sophisticated management features

Eching, Germany, October 21, 2009 − Kontron supplements its AdvancedMC™/MicroTCA™ portfolio with the rollout of the new modular Kontron AM4904/AM4910 MCHs (MicroTCA™ Carrier Hubs). To fulfill the management needs of nearly all data-intensive MicroTCA™ applications, with GbE, sRIO, PCIe or even 10 GbE fabrics, they support four different high speed fabric variants.

The modular Kontron AM4904/AM4910 MCHs comes in four versions: a pure Gigabit Ethernet switching MCH (Kontron AM4904-BASE), in combination with a PCIe mezzanine (Kontron AM4904-PCIE) or with sRIO (Kontron AM4904-SRIO), and for high bandwidth demands, with 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching (Kontron AM4910)

All versions provide central management and data switching functionality on a full-size, single-width Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) form factor. Equipped with a powerful 600MHz PowerPC 405EX processor for MCMC functionality and switching management, they enable highly efficient, redundant system architectures with up to 12 AMCs, two cooling units and four power units. With a focus on high-performance applications, Kontron's latest MCHs are a perfect fit for data-intensive MicroTCA™ based communication applications in both telecom - including 3G, LTE and network test equipment - and non-telecom markets such as military, medical, test and measurement, as well as image and video processing applications.

To provide support for various Telco clocks, all Kontron AM4904/AM4910 MCHs feature a sophisticated clock implementation and a PCI Express Fabric Clocking distribution. They also include high-performance features such as a wire speed, Enterprise-Class Ethernet switch with Layer 2 switching and Multi-Cast support including full 4K VLANs and Link Aggregation, Quality-of-Service support (QoS) and a packet classification engine for flexible Access Control Lists. A full set of standard management interfaces including: a user friendly CLI, SNMP, IPMI and Web access enable easy initialization and controlling of the MCH's switching and management functionality. External systems or shelf managers can connect to the Kontron MCHs via the Ethernet front panel ports. Special care has been taken to guarantee full support of the PICMG MicroTCA.0 standard by testing with the Polaris test suite for MicroTCA™ MCHs.

Kontron AM4904-BASE
The Kontron AM4904-BASE MCH provides Tongue 1 and Tongue 2 to the MicroTCA backplane. It offers a fully managed Layer 2 wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet switching functionality (Fabric [A]) including two 1000/100/10BASE-T uplink ports.

Kontron AM4904-PCIE
The Kontron AM4904-PCIE extends the AM4904-BASE with an additional mezzanine for PCIe switching capabilities. It offers PCIe GEN2 Fabric (DEFG) switching functionality (x4 to 12 AMC) with support for multiple root complexes.

Kontron AM4904-SRIO
The Kontron AM4904-SRIO, which is also based on the AM4904-BASE features sRIO Fabric (DEFG) switching functionality (x4 to 12 AMCs + two uplinks x4 at the front panel).

AM4910 - 10 Gigabit Ethernet
The Kontron AM4910 comes with a fully managed Layer 2 10GbE Fabric [DEFG] and Gigabit Ethernet switching functionality. Layer 3 can be offered on a project request basis. The additional Tongues 3 and 4 connect each six 10GbE lanes plus one 10GbE update channel to the backplane.

The Kontron AM4904-BASE/PCIE/SRIO and Kontron AM4910 are ready to use in any MicroTCA platform such as the Kontron OM6120 or OM6040, which greatly benefit from the serviceability, manageability and reliability Kontron's latest MCHs provide.

Samples of the new Kontron AM4904/AM4910 MCHs are available now. Full production is scheduled for end of 2009.

More information on the Kontron AM4904/AM4910 MCHsat: http://www.kontron.com/products/boards+and+mezzanines/advancedmc/microtca+carrier+hub+mch/am4904++am4910.html

More information on the Kontron MCHsat: http://www.kontron.com/products/boards+and+mezzanines/advancedmc/microtca+carrier+hub+mch/

More information on AdvancedMC™: http://www.kontron.com/amc/

More information on MicroTCA™: http://www.kontron.com/microtca