Last week, I had the honor of doing one of the keynote speeches at the DESY MicroTCA Workshop in Hamburg, Germany. Members had sent me notes on their MicroTCA-based applications and it
was terrific to learn of the wealth of diversity of systems. There are applications such as banknote inspection, industrial automation, semiconductor lithography, NASA satellite systems, Navy towed arrays and RADAR systems, and not surprisingly several telecom-based systems.
As DESY is focused on the high-energy physics market, there were dozens of presentations from labs worldwide showing how MicroTCA.4 was used in their designs. It was exciting to see how many were using the specification and several others that were planning to use it when their accelerators launch in the near future. DESY estimated that there were 180-190 attendees at the event.
IoT Efforts
As I walked the IoT Expo in Santa Clara recently, there is a clear need (and strong desire) for an IoT hardware specification. PICMG has released a new IoT Architecture Overview conceptual guide that will be posted on the Web site soon. We are targeting many of the sensor companies to participate in a specification. We have an IoT Application Guide in the works and are laying out how there are opportunities for both existing PICMG specs as well as a new hardware spec. If you interesting in participating, please contact us at info@picmg.org.
As described below, PICMG will have a booth at Embedded World this year (2018). Come see the IoT section of the booth if you attend and the many member company products that will be showcased.