High Availability Instrumentation Packaging Standards for the ILC and Detectors

ILC designers are exploring new packaging standards for Accelerator Controls and Instrumentation, particularly high-speed serial interconnect systems for intelligent instruments versus the existing parallel backplanes of VME, VXI and CAMAC. The High Availability Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) system is a new industrial open standard designed to withstand single-point hardware or software failures. The standard crate, controller, applications module and sub-modules are being investigated. All modules and sub-modules are hot-swappable. A single crate is designed for a data throughput in communications applications of 2 Tb/s and an Availability of 0.99999, which translates into a downtime of five minutes per year. The ILC is planning to develop HA architectures for controls, beam instrumentation and detector systems