Vescent ICE, Oem Integration Manual

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OEM Integration Guide

Product Manuals - http://www.vescent.com/manuals/

OEM Integration Guide

Overview

The ICE Platform consists of daughter modules that are connected together through a common power
and communications bus. The daughter modules can be controlled by a master controller (

ICE-MC1

)

that performs power regulation, monitoring, and communications interfacing. All the circuit boards are
designed to the same template so that they can be stacked together to form a board-to-board bus
without the use of an additional backplane. An example of this stacking is shown below in 

figure 1

.

Fig. 1: ICE daughter modules stacked together.

Each PCB has common locations for mounting holes, board-to-board interconnects, I/O connectors,
and heatsinking tabs. Once the boards are stacked together, each board can be addressed and
communicated with through a serial I

2

C bus (see 

this page

 for I

2

C details). Each daughter board can

have a specific I

2

C address set via dip switches on each circuit board and the master controller (

ICE-

MC1

) can route commands directly to each board. The master controller also routes and manages the

power bus going to each board. Up to 8 I

2

C addresses can be assigned, allowing up to 8 daughter

boards to be connected to a single master controller (for a total stack of 9 circuit boards). In addition
to the I

2

C communications bus, there are global event trigger lines that are routed directly to every

circuit board. These global trigger lines form the 

Event System

, which allows high-speed triggering of

pre-defined behavior through TTL without the overhead of USB or serial communications. The block
diagram in 

figure 2

 shows how master-daughter and event system communication is routed.