READING, U.K. -- Adax, the industry leader in high performance wide area communications and signaling infrastructure, has announced support for the much anticipated PICMG2.16 specification (released 5th September 2001) to its ATM Plus and HDC-cPCI cards. By supporting the PICMG2.16 Packet Switching Backplane, the Adax HDC and ATM plus cPCI boards are well suited to the integration of components for the most demanding systems. These boards give greater flexibility for system architecture design and support of distributed and High Availability (HA) models. Adax support of PICMG2.16 Packet Switching Backplane increases the inter-board communication capabilities of subsystems within the chassis by moving data onto a high availability, high speed, switched Ethernet-based network topology. The PICMG2.16 Backplane eliminates the need for card-to-card bridging, providing unparalleled system scalability through the backplane. Supported controllers and interfaces can interoperate directly via the J3 connection. Adax Inc.