ATCA, AMC, and MicroTCA look more like genetic proteins than anything to do with telecom electronics — which is somewhat apt, considering these standards for equipment practices promise to reorient the telecom industry around a building-block approach to network gear. In this Lego-style world, the theory goes, vendors will be able to design and manufacture complex network equipment more quickly, easily, and cheaply by effectively plugging together elements and (sub)systems from a range of specialist suppliers.

To get the acronyms out of the way first, ATCA stands for Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture, AMC is Advanced Mezzanine Card, and MicroTCA is just MicroTCA — essentially, a cutdown form of ATCA for smaller (and usually more numerous) items of equipment. AMCs are used in both ATCA and MicroTCA equipment.

The use of such commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) (sub)systems isn't new in the electronics world — PC vendors have been doing something similar ever since the first IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) clones appeared in the 1980s. But it does represent a major change for the telecom world, where hardware is built with high availability and other carrier-grade specifications in mind.

After a fairly long gestation — the first parts of the ATCA specifications appeared in late 2002 and early 2003, those for AMC in 2005, and for MicroTCA in 2006 — and an inevitable slow start, the market for ATCA-based equipment is starting to grow. Analysts see it reaching several billions of dollars annually within a few years.

According to Simon Stanley, author of the April 2009 Light Reading Components Insider, "ATCA, AMCs & MicroTCA: 2009 Survey & Market Outlook," the market for ATCA is set to grow significantly over the next three years, with equipment providers deploying new systems based on second-generation ATCA platforms with 10-Gigabit Ethernet switching and dual- or quad-core processor blades. The Insider's survey confirmed that approximately half of telecom equipment providers are using ATCA for a variety of applications. (See ATCA: Homegrown or Third Party?)

"After several years working to verify interoperability and ATCA system functionality, many equipment providers now feel confident in developing their own blades and integrating their own platforms — approximately 50 percent are doing just that," Stanley writes.

The PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) , the standards body watching over ATCA, is even considering extending ATCA beyond its telecom charter and into the data center. That would pit ATCA-based equipment in more direct competition with products from HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). (See ATCA Attacks the Data Center.)

Perhaps the strongest sign of the growing industry interest in ATCA et al is the string of mergers and acquisitions that have come along. Recent examples are:

As some of the these names indicate, the ATCA world now embraces a large hinterland of specialist suppliers and electronics manufacturers that may be unfamiliar to the users and purchasers of equipment from the major infrastructure vendors.

This report, therefore, rounds up a sizable chunk of the ATCA/AMC/MicroTCA players and adds a brief overview of some recent drivers and product/technology developments. It uses a very simple classification of vendors by the broad level at which they operate: component, chassis/shelf, board/blade, and platform. We have tried to make the listing as complete as possible, but this is where you, Dear Reader, can help with any companies that have been missed.

If any companies need to be added, or any information corrected, please bring it to our attention either on the message board below or by sending an email to [email protected] or to [email protected], placing "Who Makes What: ATCA, AMC and MicroTCA" in the subject line.

Here's a hyperlinked contents list:

Sources

Some historical and background details are taken from the Light Reading Insider report, "AdvancedTCA: Tomorrow's Telecom Hardware" (Vol. 5, No. 1, January 2005) by Gabriel Brown, which is a useful source of background. See also "MicroTCA in Telecom" by Simon Stanley.

— Tim Hills is a freelance telecommunications writer and journalist. He's a regular author of Light Reading reports.

Next Page: ATCA/AMC/MicroTCA Background

The PICMG consortium of companies was founded in 1994 with the initial aim of extending the standard PCI computer-bus interface to nontraditional computer applications, such as industrial automation, medical, military, and telecom. This work led to increasingly sophisticated forms of bus transport and to new specifications such as ATCA. As PICMG says, the point of all this is "to offer equipment vendors common specifications, thereby increasing availability and reducing costs and time to market."

ATCA
The ATCA base specification first appeared as PICMG 3.0 Release 1.0 at the very end of 2002 (Dec. 30) and has now reached Release 3.0 (March 24, 2008). It's a view of equipment hardware in terms of a standards-based combination of chassis/shelves/backplanes and cards/blades, with specialized cards/blades being selected to provide functions such as network processing, storage, digital signal processing, control processing, packet switching, and shelf management.

The ATCA base covers the nitty-gritty of such a view — things like the mechanics, power, cooling, interconnection (for example, star and mesh topologies), and system-management requirements of the hardware. The idea is to move away from the largely proprietary nature of constructional details common in telecom equipment to date.

The ATCA chassis is designed to fit the standard 600mm ETSI shelf, but can also be used with older 19-inch or 23-inch shelf systems. Each shelf can accommodate up to 16 slots, with three interconnected shelves possible per telecom rack.

The base backplane interface provides 10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet connectivity across the slots, and can support up to 1 Gbit/s per slot. Usually, this base interface will carry communications between the control-plane processors on each linecard, but, for higher-bandwidth applications, a fabric interface can be used as an additional and parallel communications channel. The transport technology used is usually Ethernet, although the PICMG 3.1 through 3.5 specifications can also accommodate Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, StarFabric, PCI Express, and Serial RapidIO.

Figure 1 illustrates the basic arrangement for an ATCA-based telecom system with dual-star switching and Ethernet fabric interface. The linecards are interconnected across the chassis in a number of physical zones (shown as Zone 1, 2, 3).

A key aspect of ATCA is its shelf-management capability, which monitors and controls ATCA boards and other field-replaceable units. It also controls the power, cooling, and interconnect across the system.

AMC
As the M for mezzanine suggests, AMCs are smaller plug-in cards (usually referred to as modules) that are inserted into larger ATCA carrier cards held by the ATCA chassis/shelf. The basic modules are 180mm long, and 75 or 150mm wide, and are available in three heights (half, mid, and full), thus giving a range of form factors. There is also a range of connectivity options, such as PCI Express, Gigabit Ethernet, 10-Gbit/s Ethernet, and Fibre Channel, with Serial RapidIO to follow.

The base AMC specification is AMC.0 Release 2.0 (November 2006), and the connectivity options start with AMC.1 (PCI Express — Release 2.0, October 2008).

The point of AMCs is to make a further range of building blocks available from third-party suppliers, so that ATCA blades themselves can be broken down and important functions outsourced or multisourced. However, in a further strand of the ATCA development, the ATCA carrier card is dispensed with and AMCs are directly plugged into the chassis/shelf backplane. This approach is known as MicroTCA, whose base (and only so far adopted) specification (MTCA.0) Release 1 came out in July 2006.

MicroTCA
MicroTCA uses the principles of ATCA to offer a standardized platform for smaller systems that need to meet lower costs than the full ATCA approach. This makes it particularly relevant to the edges of the network, where equipment tends to be physically smaller; more modestly specified in terns of processing power, storage, and so on; and much more numerous than in the heavyweight applications of the network core, which tends to be dominated by relatively small numbers of powerful nodes.

So MicroTCA retains, for example, the flexible switching fabrics and carrier-grade compliance of the full ATCA, but offers much more flexible packaging, including 300mm practice (which ATCA does not). MicroTCA is expected to be used in a wide range of applications other than telecom (industrial, medical, and defense, for example), and its configurational flexibility is seen as a key attribute. Various subconfigurations have already been informally defined — for example, PicoTCA for very small systems (say, two or four AMC modules), an 8-inch cube for a fixed configuration with 12 AMCs, and a very flexible 19-inch rack configuration, scalable to 192 AMCs.

A typical MicroTCA chassis might thus hold 12 AMC modules on its backplane, connected by Gigabit Ethernet or PCI Express, and with a switching fabric to connect everything together. A power module provides switched power to each slot, and a MicroTCA Carrier Hub (MCH) provides the shelf management and switching.

Next Page: Categories & Vendors

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.

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

This page aims to give an indication of the range and diversity of ATCA products by looking at a few typical examples of recent developments in the various categories.

Components
This is a wide category, incorporating sub-board silicon devices and mechanical connectors, switches, connectors, fixers, and face plates, to name a few examples. As such, it tends to lie very much in the domain of the general component industry.

Backplanes, Shelves & Chassis
Vendors in this category often cover boards and blades as well, and innovation tends to occur at the higher-value category. But there are developments at the shelf/chassis level, particularly for MicroTCA, where (as already mentioned) the enclosure flexibility of the form factor is expected to be a key characteristic. Some examples are:

Boards and Blades
Because of the key role of this category in the industry value chain, there is unsurprisingly a lot of recent activity, so the following is only a very limited selection. An obvious trend is the increasing amount of processing power now going into ATCA blades and AMCs, which in turn widens the scope of potential applications of ATCA.

Platforms
As pointed out earlier, "platform" can have a fairly broad meaning among vendors, as the following examples show. The common theme is the pulling together of sufficient ATCA-related pieces to provide an application-ready system that an OEM vendor can use either as a finished product or as a development platform. Software is an important component of these products.

— Tim Hills is a freelance telecommunications writer and journalist. He's a regular author of Light Reading reports.

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