Where is All That Cooling Air Going?
With the functionality of electronics expanding at a rapid pace, as it has over the past twenty to thirty years, various product implementations have been market successes. Form factors such as VME, VME64, VME64x, CompactPCI, PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC), and Industry Packs (IP) have all been standardized by organizations such as IEEE, VITA and PICMG. In recent years, we have seen rapid growth in product offerings using the Computer Mezzanine Cards (CMC) and PCI Mezzanine Cards (PMC) form factor. A high percentage of new circuit card designs for VME64x and CompactPCI have provisions for supporting at least one (typically PMC) mezzanine module. The flexibility provided by these mezzanine circuit cards allow system integrators to more easily configure solutions with the types and amounts of I/O that they require for their application. The functionality of CMC/PMC Modules has been recently extended by the ANSI-VITA 32 Processor PMC (PrPMC) standard and further extensions are now being develop
