Intelligent Platform-Management Controller for Low-Level RF Control System ATCA Carrier Board

High availability and reliability are among the most desirable features of control systems in modern high-energy physics (HEP) and other big-scale scientific experiments. One of the recent developments that has influenced this field has been the emergence of the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA). Designed for the telecommunications industry, it has been successfully applied in other domains, such as accelerator control systems. A good example is the application of ATCA standard for the design of the low-level RF (LLRF) control system for the X-Ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) being developed in Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY). Reliability and availability requirements for such a facility play a crucial role among other parameters. Thus, the ATCA standard, with five-nines availability, is considered to be one of the best candidates for this system. This paper focuses on the central-management unit of every ATCA board, namely, the intelligent platform-management controller (IPMC), developed for the LLRF ATCA carrier board. It is also argued that it is possible to create a fully functional IPMC using base specifications which is only a more economical solution than acquiring such products from ATCA vendors. This work supports the concept of an open-source community solution under the xTCA for physics collaboration dealing with IPMC/MMC development and wishes to contribute to it. The IPMC solution presented here is mainly hardware independent as proper code organization allowed to separate low-level device drivers and high-level application logic dealing with the ATCA standard, which makes it portable for new carrier-board designs. It also follows the latest trends in xTCA development introduced by the xTCA for Physics initiative. A firmware upgrade of programmable devices (field-programmable gate arrays and digital signal processors) has been proposed. Currently, this is not included in the standard. However, this functionality is needed in HEP applications by using xTCA and is useful in these cases.