Serenity is an ATCA prototyping platform designed to explore alternative, novel design choices
for CMS Phase-2. It uses a newly available interconnect technology from Samtec (Z-RAY) to
mount a removable processing unit (FPGA) that should mitigate risk and provides significant
flexibility in processing unit choice and connectivity. We explore the pros and cons of using an
industry-standard Computer-On-Module running standard Centos Linux and a small service
FPGA for low level control. Specially designed Kapton heaters have been used to validate the
thermal design of the card and broader considerations of ATCA systems.