Diagnostic application for development of custom ATCA Carrier Board for LLRF

The Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) standard describes a powerful and efficient platform. With multiple integrated solutions like redundancies and intelligent control mechanisms this technology is characterized with reliability estimated at the level of 99.99999 percent. These features make the standard perfect for use in projects like the free electron laser in Hamburg (FLASH) and the X-ray free electron laser (X-FEL) in order to help them meet the requirements of high availability and reliability. The ATCA standard incorporates advanced control systems defined in the intelligent platform management interface (IPMI) specification as one of the key elements. The entire ATCA implementation retains its functionality as long as the IPMI remains operational. The complexity level of the application increases, which results in preparing it to run and debugging being more difficult to perform. At the same time, only scrupulous elimination of any kind of possible deficiencies can enable the ATCA implementation to offer the desired level of reliability. Thus, diagnostics become crucial, which creates a need for additional tools performing these tasks during the preparations of both hardware and software for the ATCA application. The paper presents application aiding in development of the prototype carrier board by enabling the user of external PC station to perform diagnostic and control activities over the board. It helps in examining all its components at the stage of running the board, as well as in further operation analysis.