Home > News > Archive Euro News > 2002

Adax Announces Support For New PICMG2.16 Telecoms Architecture

Adax, the industry leader in high performance wide area communications and signaling infrastructure, has announced support for the much anticipated PICMG2.16 specification (released 5th September 2001) to its ATM Plus and HDC-cPCI cards. By supporting the PICMG2.16 Packet Switching Backplane, the Adax HDC and ATM plus cPCI boards are well suited to the integration of components for the most demanding systems. These boards give greater flexibility for system architecture design and support of distributed and High Availability (HA) models.

Adax support of PICMG2.16 Packet Switching Backplane increases the inter-board communication capabilities of subsystems within the chassis by moving data onto a high availability, high speed, switched Ethernet-based network topology. The PICMG2.16 Backplane eliminates the need for card-to-card bridging, providing unparalleled system scalability through the backplane. Supported controllers and interfaces can interoperate directly via the J3 connection.

Technical Background

The Compact PCI Packet Switching Backplane is an extension to the PICMG2.x family of specifications that overlays a packet based switching architecture to create an embedded system area network. It supplements the robust, reliable and hot swap capable CompactPCI architecture with the easily integrated, low cost, high performance and extensible Ethernet.

This creates a platform well suited to the integration of components for the most demanding systems and empowers system integration and design to ascend to higher layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol stack, thus reducing system integration time.

The purpose of the Packet Switching Backplane specification is to provide designers, manufacturers and integrators with a common platform for implementing an embedded system area network (ESAN) that provides all the benefits of a local area network (LAN) in an embedded system environment. An ESAN can provide high availability (HA) by providing redundancy in both interconnections and switching components.