ICALEPCS 2009
WEP038
CompactPCI Express for Control Applications
H.Kleines*, M.Drochner, M.Ramm, W.Erven (FZJ)
CompactPCI (CPCI) is well established in control applications as a standard for industrial PCs and as a standard for front-end instrumentation, e.g. by means of the transparent optical PCI/CPCI Bridge MXI-4 from National Instruments. In both application areas increasing performance requirements ask for a replacement of the parallel CPCI bus by a backplane based on high speed serial links, similar to the replacement of PCI by PCIe in the desktop environment. CompactPCI Express (CPCIe) and its derivative PXI Express (PXIe) both provide a smooth and cost-efficient transition path from CPCI to high speed serial links on the backplane. Forschungszentrum Jülich has developed a CPCIe carrier board for CMC daughter modules that is compatible to the SIS1100 boards from company Struck Innovative Systeme. The CPCIe carrierboard is based on a single lane PCIe implementation with the PEX8311 ASIC from PLX. A development environment has been setup, that consists of crates from Schroff, CPUs from MEN and the transparent electrical PXIe/PCIe bridge MXI-Express from National Instruments. The design and application of the new board as well first experiences with the new technology are presented.