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Motorola fuels PCI fire Motorola plays CompactPCI card By David Lieberman, EE Times Tempe, Ariz. -- Propelled by Motorola Computer Group's plans to introduce Compact PCI and X86 boards, the embedded market moved closer to PC technologies this week. The VMEbus market leader will take the wraps off its first CompactPCI (CPCI) board today, a PowerPC-based CPU board, and it will confirm persistent rumors that its CPCI plans include boards with Intel-architecture processors running Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. "We support both the VME and CPCI architectures, and we're doing a lot of product development for both," said Jerry Gipper, marketing director for MCG's Technical Products Division. CPCI, he said, represents "an incremental business strategy for us, not a [VMEbus] replacement strategy at all. We fully understand that some of our VME business is going to migrate to CPCI, but we also intend to generate new VME business. They're complementary. The reason Motorola hasn't gone public about CPCI is because of the fine line we walk between the two [bus architectures]." According to Gipper, "VME solves problems that CPCI does not. Compact PCI will find a niche in systems that need access to high-performance desktop operating systems and high-bandwidth block-oriented I/O in a more rugged package than that offered by passive-backplane PCI-based systems." One area where CPCI falls short, according to VMEbus advocates, is in systems that need deterministic (that is, "hard real-time") operation, and that is reflected in MCG's processor and operating-system strategy. According to CPCI product manager Greg Novack, Motorola's Intel CPCI CPU boards will be focused on Windows NT applications, while its PowerPC CPU boards will run the real-time operating systems--from Lynx, Wind River, Microware and ISI--that the company has traditionally supported. The company also recently cut a deal with Chorus to add that company's operating software to its stable. Chorus has a very strong presence in the application arena that's expected to be the big hot spot for CPCI: telecommunications equipment. One area of serious interest to the telecommunications industry is the ability to swap boards into and out of a system without shutting the system down, but both VMEbus and CPCI lack a standardized "hot swap" methodology.
However, Gipper said, "in the last three months, things have been very active
in hot swap for CPCI" in CPCI's sponsor organization, PCI Industrial
Manufacturers Group of Wakefield, Mass., which Motorola joined in the fall.
"We've taken a very aggressive involvement with that and are trying to drive
it to completion very quickly," Gipper said.
(c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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