Elma Electronic Announces PICMG 2.17 Development Platform

FREMONT, California, August 17, 2002 - Elma Electronic Inc., a global manufacturer of electronic packaging products, has announced a PICMG 2.17 Development Platform. Designed for prototyping of a system compliant to the recently ratified PICMG 2.17 specification, the development platform comes in a 9U-high chassis size.

The development chassis allows the system designer to test the implementation of the StarFabric switched fabric across a 17-slot PICMG 2.17-compliant backplane, along with standard cards using the CompactPCI bus and/or the H.110 bus. This system is ideal for testing applications where high availability (HA) is required. The superior cooling design consists of individual fan modules allow for replacement of one fan without taking the entire cooling system offline. The system includes three individually removable plug-in fans, located below the cards, providing up to 300 cfm of forced air and two radial fans in plug removable trays to provide redundant cooling. In addition, the dual 350 watt, N+1 redundant power supplies insure system operation in the event of a failure.

Measuring 9U high, 84HP and 290mm deep, this high-performance unit features a 17-slot PICMG 2.17 backplane. Elma's backplane centers, Bustronic (Americas) and TreNew (Europe) share resources to offer a powerhouse team in switched fabric backplanes. The backplane consists of 10 basic node slots, dual fabric slots, two node slots with H.110, a StarFabric system slot with cPCI and H.110, and two standard cPCI with H.110 slots. The right side of the backplane offers two (4 optional) 47-pin pluggable power supply connectors. This topology allows ample testing of system designs in various configurations, with a separate segment for CompactPCI and H.110.

The StarFabric technology addresses next-gen communications equipment requirements such as trunk speed evolution from OC3 to OC12/OC48 and beyond, allowing 10K to 100K ports per single chassis. StarFabric supports simultaneous transmission of packet, cell, and voice (TDM) traffic and provides High Availability features such as fault detection and isolation, hardware fail-over, and hot swappability. The StarFabric solution provides an elegant migration path from existing bus-based architectures like PCI, H.110, Utopia, etc. It is 100% backwards compatible to existing PCI and CompactPCI technology; so new drivers, software, etc, do not need to be created.

About Elma Electronic
Elma Electronic Inc. is a leading manufacturer and supplier of enclosures, backplanes, cabinets, cases, and "ready-to-run" packaging for CPCI, Rugged COTS, VME/64x, VXI, PC and custom bus structures. Elma's component product line offers a wide selection of top quality switches knobs and LED arrays. The company has been a worldwide supplier of dependable, high performance products for over 35 years. Elma operates three facilities in the continental United States plus has locations in Switzerland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Israel.

Elma Electronic Inc. is located at 44350 Grimmer Blvd., Fremont, CA 94538 USA. Telephone (510) 656-3400 - Fax (510)656-3783. www.elma.com