MicroTCA at the Summit, AdvancedTCA beyond the CO

I hope you are lucky enough to be reading this at the MicroTCA Summit being held in Chantilly, Virginia May 12-14. The MicroTCA and AdvancedTCA Summits are annual events put on by Lance Leventhal and his excellent crew at Conference Concepts. They are a great way to see the latest in gear, talk to the experts, and find out what the competition is doing. The increasing interest in MicroTCA evidenced by the military comes through at this year’s event. Among the speakers are Colonel Gregory Breazile of the United States Marine Corps and Mark Leibowitz of BAE Systems. Mark is a major contributor to the PICMG effort to develop an extremely rugged, conduction-cooled version of the standard. The market dynamics of MicroTCA are quite different than AdvancedTCA, with many more small- to medium-sized companies producing a wide range of products for applications beyond telecom. This is somewhat different than AdvancedTCA, which has been aimed at large telecom customers who have tended to be served by large suppliers with global reach.

Speaking of AdvancedTCA, and you know I do that a lot, the PICMG organization has just announced an effort to extend the capabilities of this successful standard beyond those required by the traditional telecom Central Office. Bladed architectures, of which AdvancedTCA is a good example, are becoming popular in network data centers and more traditional enterprise server farms. However, products currently available are either completely proprietary or mostly so. There is much in the AdvancedTCA standard that is not needed for data center applications. Solution? Simplify some requirements so costs can be reduced. A major goal of the effort is to enable double-wide, double-board blades with extremely high compute densities and power capabilities of up to 600 W per single slot and 800 W for dual-slot solutions.

We have a good collection of articles this month on a variety of MicroTCA, AdvancedTCA, and related topics. Eric Heikkila from Venture Development Corporation specializes in analyzing the AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA markets. He is joined by Tony Romero and Will Smith from Performance Technologies in providing us a great tutorial on things to evaluate when picking a vendor for a MicroTCA-based product. Vollrath Dirksen from N.A.T. also gives us guidance on using MicroTCA by evaluating the various supported data fabrics. He discusses the features and applicability of Ethernet, Serial RapidIO, and PCI Express. Both articles reinforce the wide appeal of MicroTCA beyond the telecom space and should be read by anyone planning on using MicroTCA.

My friend Dr. Asif Naseem from GoAhead explains in his article the necessity of designing high availability into a product from the very beginning and not just adding it on as an afterthought. This is a must-read for any designer planning on implementing HA software.

Neil Petraca from Pentair Electronic Packaging gives us a good introduction to the issues surrounding packaging design that minimizes Electro Magnetic Interference and leakage. As processor and fabric switching speeds continue to increase, even small gaps and apertures in a chassis can result in unacceptably high levels of RF leakage. Pass this article on to your packaging folks.

Online, make sure to check out the article from Nitin Tomar, Continuous Computing at www.compactpci-systems.com/articles/id?3901. He addresses design issues surrounding next generation wireless networks that use very fast Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. He explains how AdvancedTCA systems can be designed to use this new technology and how migration from 3G to LTE can be accomplished. LTE: I wonder who came up with that name?

Joe Pavlat

Editorial Director