Towards widespread use of MTCA in accelerators

Tamura, Fumihiko   ; Yoshii, Masahito*; Kamikubota, Norihiko*; Takahashi, Hiroki  

MTCA (MicroTCA) is expected to be the next generation platform for advanced control in accelerators. MTCA has many advantages over the widely used VMEs, such as high speed, large data transfer capacity, and high maintainability with hot-swappable modules. After the application to the LLRF control system at KEK, MTCA has been used in many accelerators around the world, while it takes a long time for MTCA to spread to the accelerators in Japan. Recently, the number of large-scale adoptions such as the LLRF control system, for the J-PARC RCS has been increasing. In this article, we introduce a case study of MTCA adoption and discuss why MTCA has not been widely used in Japan. Also, the efforts for the future promotion of MTCA in Japan are reported.