PICMG

The PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) is a consortium of over 227 companies. Founded in 1994, the group was originally formed to adapt PCI technology for use in high-performance telecommunications, military, and industrial computing applications, but its work has now grown to include newer technologies. PICMG is distinct from the similarly named and adjacently-focused PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG).

PICMG currently focuses on developing and implementing specifications and guidelines for open standards-based computer architectures from a wide variety of interconnects.

PICMG's original mission was to provide extensions to the PCI standard developed by PCI-SIG for a range of applications. The organization's collaborations eventually expanded to include a variety of interconnect technologies for industrial computing and telecommunications.

In 2011, PICMG completed its transfer of assets from the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA). Since 2006, CP-TA had been a collaboration of communications vendors, developing interoperability testing requirements, methodologies, and procedures based on open specifications from PICMG, The Linux Foundation, and the Service Availability Forum. PICMG will form an xTCA promotional subcommittee to carry on the educational and marketing outreach formerly conducted by members of the CP-TA marketing work group.

For many years, PICMG used a numerical naming convention with specification being referred to as “PICMG X.YY”. Where X was used denoted differing form factors (“1” for slot card based single board computers, “2” for CompactPCI and “3” for AdvancedTCA) while YY was used to indicate incremental changes, option definitions or slight variation of a specification form its core specification. In 2003, PICMG added an acronym-based naming convention for its specifications to yield better results from internet search engines. Specifications are now often named ABCD.X where ABCD is an acronym of the specification. In this naming convention, base or main specification are denote with X=0 (i.e. ABCD.0) and PICMG subsidiary specifications are denoted X>0. PICMG subsidiary specifications represent how various options or variations of a based specification should be handled.

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