OpenIPMC: a free and open source Intelligent Platform Management Controller

TL;DR

OpenIPMC is an open source firmware for Intelligent Platform Management Controllers, offering customizable, architecture-independent features for monitoring and managing electronic boards, especially in high energy physics applications.

Contribution

This work introduces OpenIPMC, a fully open source, customizable IPMC firmware based on FreeRTOS, compatible with multiple microcontroller architectures.

Findings

Successfully implemented on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+

Supports ESP32 and STM32 architectures

Provides comprehensive monitoring and control functions

Abstract

OpenIPMC is a free and open source firmware designed to operate as an Intelligent Platform Management Controller (IPMC). An IPMC is a fundamental component of electronic boards conformant to the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) standard, currently being adopted by a number of high energy physics experiments, and is responsible for monitoring the health parameters of the board, managing its power states, and providing board control, debug and recovery functions to remote clients. OpenIPMC is based on the FreeRTOS real-time operating system and is designed to be architecture-independent, allowing it to be built for a variety of different Microcontrollers. Having a fully free and open source code is an innovative aspect for this kind of firmware, allowing full customization by the user. In this work we present the features and structure of OpenIPMC and its example implementations on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ (ZynqUS+), Espressif ESP32, and ST Microelectronics STM32 architectures.