Systems designers’ dreams become reality with AdvancedMCs

Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AdvancedMCs) appear to be on the way to creating a market bigger than all PCI Mezzanine Cards (PMCs) and other daughterboards combined. There are two main reasons this is likely to occur – AdvancedMCs have the right scale for a hot-pluggable Field Replaceable Unit (FRU) and they leverage AdvancedTCA standardization work. AdvancedMCs will most likely replace proprietary functional modules at a high enough volume so that the economies of scale and their ubiquitous use in the telecom sector will drive costs to commodity levels. Just think what will happen if a good fraction of the 1.7 billion mobile subscribers start using a chain of AdvancedMCs in Node Bs, RNCs, and gateways, extending to multimedia transcoding processing elements.