Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Electron-Ion Collider, Upton, New York, USA
BNL, Upton, New York, USA
VME architecture was developed in late 1970s. It has proved to be a rugged control system hardware platform for the last four decades. Today the VME hardware platform is facing four challenges from 1) backplane communication speed bottleneck; 2) computing power limits from centralized computing infrastructure; 3) obsolescence and cost issues to support a real-time operating system; 4) obsolescence issues of the legacy VME hardware. The next generation hardware platform such as ATCA and microTCA requires fundamental changes in hardware and software. It also needs large investment. For many legacy system upgrades, this approach is not applicable. We will discuss an open-source hardware platform, VME2E (VME to Ethernet), which allows the one-to-one replacement of legacy VME module without disassembling of the existing VME system. The VME2E has the VME form factor. It can be installed the existing VME chassis, but without use the VME backplane to communicate with the front-end computer and therefore solves the first three challenges listed above. The VME2E will only take advantage of two good benefits from a VME system: stable power supply which VME2E module will get from the backplane, and the cooling environment. The VME2E will have the most advanced 14nm Xilinx FPGA SOM with GigE for parallel computing and high speed communication. It has a high pin count (HPC) FPGA mezzanine connector (FMC) to benefit the IO daughter boards supply of the FMC ecosystem. The VME2E is designed as a low cost, open-source common platform for legacy VME upgrade.
