CP-TA and PICMG Drive Improved AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA and AdvancedMC Interoperability at Industry Workshop

STRAUBENHARDT, Germany--The Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA) and PICMG have once again joined forces to host an Interoperability Workshop to test AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA and AMC components against industry profiles and test suites. The event wrapped up in Straubenhardt, Germany at the Schroff Training Center.

The workshop was open to members of CP-TA and PICMG and provided a confidential atmosphere for testing, learning and resolving issues. Fifteen companies participated in the event.

“The efforts of CP-TA and PICMG have helped to improve interoperability among ATCA, MicroTCA and AMC components offered by various vendors,” said Eric Heikkila, Director of the embedded hardware systems practice at Venture Development Corporation. “Interoperability is a crucial factor for the industry to realize the benefits of open standards and specifications.”

CP-TA provided an ATCA and Micro-TCA chassis and featured its testing guidelines and tools including AMC, MicroTCA and ATCA-Tester manageability interoperability tools from Polaris Networks. CP-TA offered testing for building block vendors of all sizes against CP-TA adopted conformance tools as well as a free report.

PICMG has hosted many Interoperability Workshops on its own over the last several years, and now periodically partners with CP-TA to offer a joint workshop to its members.

“With each subsequent event, I am seeing the interoperability of products significantly improve,” said Joe Pavlat, PICMG President. “These workshops provide vendors with valuable information to bring back to their development labs and work to improve products. The combined knowledge gained at these workshops continues to improve the industry.”

CP-TAs mission is to provide testing methods and tools to the industry to enable interoperability testing against a standard reference. This gives the Network Equipment Providers the freedom to choose among a number of vendors with interoperable products.

“We are pleased that our standardized test methodologies and tools are delivering value to the industry,” said Nirlay Kundu, CP-TA Compliance Work Group Chair. “This is a difficult problem that we are trying to solve and it is exciting to see our work in action at the event.”

About the Communications Platforms Trade Association

The Communications Platforms Trade Association is a global organization of communications platform and building block providers whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of SIG-governed, open specification-based communication platforms by certifying interoperable building blocks. For more information about CP-TA, visit www.cp-ta.org.

About PICMG

Founded in 1994, PICMG is a consortium of more than 450 companies that collaboratively develop open specifications for high performance telecommunications and industrial computing applications. The members of the consortium have a long history of developing and using leading-edge products for these industries. For information about PICMG membership, or to find out how to obtain PICMG specifications, visit the PICMG Web site at www.picmg.org or call PICMG headquarters at (781) 246-9318.

PICMG, AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC and MicroTCA are registered trademarks of PICMG.