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AdvancedTCA (ATCA) is the largest specification effort in the history of PICMG, with more than 100 companies participating. ATCA, part of the PICMG 3.X family, is a new series of specifications targeted to the requirements for the next generation of carrier-grade communications equipment.

For a long time proprietary products have dominated the telecom market but they take a long time to develop, costs are high, time to market is slow, return on investment is low and competitiveness is lost. For many years Telecom Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs) and Telecom Operators have been looking to develop a commercial, off-the shelf (COTS) strategy for Network Equipment as a more efficient and effective way of bringing new products to market.

ATCA tackles major bandwidth, availability, upgradeability, scalability, management, cost and interoperability issues that faced previous standards and is fast becoming the standard of choice for wireless infrastructure and other communications equipment.

The greater capacity of ATCA systems and the revised power requirements enable the development of applications with higher performance and more functionality, and multiple applications can be deployed in one ATCA system.

The result is that ATCA can provide a highly-reliable, highly-available, scalable and high-performance platform for network critical elements in both wireless and wireline networks. This enables TEMs to focus their time and efforts on the applications rather than the platform that they will run on, thus restoring the TEMs competitive advantage whilst at the same time lowering the cost to the Operator.

Adax and ATCA

Adax is the industry leader and innovator for high performance communications controllers for signaling infrastructure and currently support PCI, PCIe, PMC and cPCI architectures. Adax is now extending its product line to AMC cards for ATCA and MicroTCA.

ATCA is an emerging standard, and Adax welcomes ATCA and AMC cards to our product line but with nearly 25 years of experience with evolving standards we know that it will take time to confidently transition to AMC and ATCA. Thus, in addition to the new ATCA products Adax will continue to offer the full suite of PCI, PCIe, PMC and cPCI signaling products that customers have relied on for years. At the same time we will continue to protect our customer’s investment in their applications by ensuring that the upper API is always open and consistent, and supporting all hardware formats with a SINGLE board driver. So customer’s can deploy their signaling application on the most appropriate hardware architecture with little or no change to the application.

AMC

AMC boards are perfect for I/O intensive telecom applications as they enhance ATCA systems by providing highly-flexible, high-performance, high-bandwidth, multi-protocol interfaces in individual, hot-swappable modules. AMC I/O cards offer TEMs a versatile platform for quickly building modular telecom systems that can be quickly and cost-effectively designed, manufactured, scaled, upgraded and serviced.

Adax believes that AMC I/O cards will be the clear winner as the ATCA market rapidly expands from 2007-9. However Adax is concerned with the amount of bandwidth and throughput necessary to achieve the high demands of the new generation of telecom applications, consequently this has been a major part of the Adax design criteria for this new range of I/O AMC cards.

MicroTCA

With MicroTCA AMC modules can be used directly, without the need for an ATCA or custom carrier. This will enable substantial savings in terms of size, cost and power, and improves the scalability of the ATCA architecture for Next Generation Network elements where both CAPEX and OPEX are always important. As the PICMG standard says: “Where AdvancedTCA is optimized for very high capacity, high performance applications, MicroTCA is designed to address cost sensitive and physically smaller applications with lower capacity, performance, and perhaps less stringent availability requirements. MicroTCA preserves many of the important philosophies of AdvancedTCA, including basic interconnect topologies and management structure”.

Adax AMC Product Family

Adax has a number of ATCA and AMC products planned for the future, the latest being the AMC version of the hugely successful Adax HDCIII signaling controller:

HDCIII-AMC features include

• 8 software selectable trunks of full E1, T1, or J1 per card
• 2, 4 and 8 trunk card options available
• Up to 248 LSL MTP2 links per card with high line utilization
• Up to 8 HSL MTP2 links per card
• Support for multiple protocols on one card, including SS7 MTP2, Frame Relay, HDLC, X.25, LAPB/D/F/V5.
• On-board RISC processor and Streams environment reduces CPU overhead and maximizes performance.
• PMC, AMC, PCI/X and PCIe board formats

For full product information please click here.

Further ATCA products planned for the future include a Processor AMC board, an ATCA carrier card for I/O acceleration and AMC modules for ATM, IP Packet Processing (including SIGTRAN and SIP), and IP Security.