SCA-THUNDER

The SCA-THUNDER is a rich featured high performance 5HP (also legacy 4HP) 3U CompactPCI® Serial CPU board, equipped with a powerful Intel® Core™ Ultra processor (Meteor Lake H platform) for advanced industry use cases. Multiple different compute engines – P-cores, E-cores, Intel® Arc™ GPU, and Intel® AI Boost – work together to accelerate e.g. AI-augmented industrial process control (AIPC) or machine control. The SCA-THUNDER front panel is provided with three 2.5Gbps RJ45 Ethernet jacks for networking, and up to four 10Gbps USB Type-C receptacles (DisplayPort Alternate Mode enabled) for versatile USB device and display attachment, up to 4 x 4k displays.

The SCA-THUNDER is equipped with up to 96GB DDR5 RAM. Up to 48GB memory-down are provided for rugged applications, and another 48GB are available via the SODIMM socket. On-board mass-storage solutions are based on a variety of low profile mezzanine expansion cards available, which accommodate amongst other functions a fast PCI Express® Gen4 x 4 NVMe® SSD module. Full support for CompactPCI® Serial backplanes is provided, e.g. a fat pipe slot for a PCIe® Gen5 x 8 peripheral card (with CPCI-S.0 R4.0 to come). As an option, up to eight Gigabit Ethernet ports are available via the backplane connector P6 by means of a mezzanine module.

While mechanically compliant to CompactPCI® Classic, CompactPCI® Serial (PICMG® CPCIS.0) defines a completely new card slot, based on PCI Express®, SATA, Gigabit Ethernet and USB serial data lines. Up to 6 high-speed backplane connectors P1 – P6 are provided on a system slot controller such as the SCA-THUNDER, which can be considered as a root hub with respect to most signal lines. A passive backplane is used for distribution of a defined subset of I/O channels from the system slot to each of up to eight peripheral slots in a CompactPCI® Serial system.

Most CompactPCI® Serial peripheral slot cards require only the backplane connector P1, which comprises PCIe®, SATA and USB signals, resulting in a concise and inexpensive peripheral board design. More powerful peripheral cards profit from two so called Fat Pipe slots (PCIe® x 8). The SCA-THUNDER is a native CompactPCI® Serial CPU card, suitable for usage in a pure CPCI Serial environment. Due to its generous backplane capabilities (21 x PCI Express® up to Gen5, 8 x USB3, 2 x SATA 6G, up to 8 x GbE), very powerful industrial systems can be built.