Advanced Switching Waits In The Wings

April 28, 2005

Designers who support large multiprocessor systems are turning to Advanced Switching (AS), according to the Advanced Switching Interconnect Special Interest Group (ASI SIG). As uses the same physical layer as PCI Express. As a result, designers

William G. Wong

Designers who support large multiprocessor systems are turning to Advanced Switching (AS), according to the Advanced Switching Interconnect Special Interest Group (ASI SIG).

As uses the same physical layer as PCI Express. As a result, designers will run into the same chip, board, and connector problems encountered by PCI Express system designers. However, AS is even more difficult, because designers must contend with large backplanes.

Companies like Elma Bustronics and Pentair Enclosures attack the problem by delivering standard backplanes for architectures like AdvancedTCA. It's very difficult to design and test one of these backplanes. But most embedded designers in this arena will be working on board designs, not backplane designs.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.