Embedded: Blade Cuts Down On Comm Infrastructure Complexity

System configuration for communication infrastructure applications like SS7 signaling and media gateways often is a tough task. Enter the Katana750v telecom blade, which incorporates a CTBus/H.110 TDM interconnect. The blade runs an IBM PowerPC 750FX processor with 1 Gbyte of SDRAM and 128 Mbytes of flash memory. There's also two 66-MHz PTMC sites and five PICMG 2.16-compatible Ethernet channels. The Katana supports the PICMG 2.9 System Management Bus, which provides an I²C-based Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI). Each site's local CTBus is connected to an H.110 bridge and timeslot interchanger. The blade goes for under $2000.