There are now many vendors of ATCA, ACM, and MicroTCA products. The range of the products themselves is correspondingly very wide and growing, as just about any processor-based equipment can be engineered into these formats.

This Who Makes What uses a simple vendor categorization based on broad levels of involvement in the technologies, as follows.

• Component level: Covers a wide range of basic items used in the construction of the higher-level products. Examples include connectors for AMCs, or front-panel fixers for ATCA cards and blades. This category also provides a convenient location for a few silicon-device specialists.

• Backplane/shelf/chassis level: Covers the basic physical parts and also the complete ATCA/MicroTCA chassis and enclosures before they are loaded with application-specific ACTA cards/blades. Although some vendors at this level specialize in, say, just backplanes or the metal-bashing of chassis and enclosures, many will provide a complete chassis or enclosure built to the base ATCA/MicroTCA specification.

• Board/blade level: Covers the ATCA cards and blades, as well as AMCs and AMC-based systems and subsystems. Examples include complete single-board processors, AMC-compliant DSP subsystems, and AMC-specified system interconnects such as RapidIO.

• Platform level: Strictly covers the loaded ATCA/MicroTCA chassis that provide OEMs with some fully functioning system capabilities or elements (for example, carrier-class blade server, or Ethernet switch, or customizable application platform). See the next page for more details on this sort of capability. Note that "platform" tends to be used by some vendors in the more modest sense of an ATCA or MicroTCA chassis that is complete in the full ATCA sense (with power, cooling, shelf management, and so on) but is still awaiting the application-specific blades.

It's worth stressing that, while many vendors produce a range of products within a given category, others may be much more limited. This is particularly noticeable for AMCs and ATCA blades, for example, where some vendors are very focused on particular applications (Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters, for example). Others cover the wider range of applications needed in, say, carrier-grade central-office equipment.

Software and middleware are obviously used extensively in ATCA-based products but are not included in the listing of this Who Makes What in the interest of practicality; their inclusion would add a huge further dimension to the vendor list. However, it's necessary to stress that it has long been realized that the standardized ATCA approach encourages the formation of pre-integrated hardware/software combinations of considerable sophistication. For example, Wind River Systems Inc., RadiSys, and OpenClovis a couple of years ago began offering a collaborative solution comprising the Wind River Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition; the RadiSys Promentum family of ATCA hardware platforms; and the OpenClovis Application Service Platform (ASP). The idea of this sort of platform is to deliver a fully tested system to the OEM.

Figure 2, taken from the earlier Light Reading Insider, gives further detail on aspects of the three upper levels and their interrelationships.

Table 1 lists a fairly wide selection of vendors against the four levels described above, along with a brief indication of their specific product interests. As might be expected, the board/blade level tends to dominate — it's got higher value than chassis and with scope for innovation, while not being as financially demanding as platforms, making it suitable for smaller specialists. AMCs are also well supported, presumably for their potentially very wide application in many markets beyond just telecom.

Although there is a lot of specialization, many vendors cover two or more categories — particularly the pairing of boards/blades with platforms, a combination that represents the acme of hardware value. Only a small number cover all three of the higher-layer categories.

Table 1: Vendors Categorized by Main Levels of Involvement in ATCA, AMC, and MicroTCA

Next Page: What's Around