xTCA for physics standards roadmaps & SLAC initiatives

This paper describes progress since the completion of xTCA for Physics instrumentation standards in 2011. The standards are extensions of the Telecom standard called Advanced Telecommunications Computer Architecture for the physics community. The main goals are to provide new IO, timing and synchronization features as well as standard software interface guidelines for accelerator control and instrumentation systems. After issuing the basic IO standards in 2012 for both ATCA and its smaller mezzanine card version known as MicroTCA, labs and industry have continued to collaborate to bring many lab-developed products to market for Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) availability. In the course of development some significant products were built using both lab and industry sources and tested on-beam for the LCLS-II accelerator project to prove precision of analog performance. These solutions were adopted for the LCLS-II injector and systems completed to readiness for installation in 2013. A change in direction of LCLS-II to a superconducting CW machine running at 1MHz bunch rate has raised additional challenges requiring some redesign. The ongoing Hardware and Software working group tasks are summarized including a new backplane extension as well as a brief description of impacts of the new CW machine design.