By Cheryl Coupé

Experts See Growth Opportunities in Telecom and Mil/Aero Applications

With the recession finally (knock on wood) heading into the history books, and with voracious demand for high-bandwidth communications driving infrastructure growth, the future looks bright for AdvancedTCA (ATCA) and MicroTCA designs. But high-performance can also bring design headaches. EE Catalog talked to Joe McDevitt, VP of marketing for PICMG – the consortium responsible for the ATCA and MicroTCA specifications – as well as several key suppliers in this arena to get their views. What follows is a detailed discussion on trends, strategies and market opportunities, with input from Drew Sproul, director of marketing for Adax, Inc., Terry Manus, VP of marketing and sales for MicroBlade, and Marc DeVinney, VP of engineering for Interphase Corporation.

EE Catalog: What new trends are driving the engineering of ATCA/MicroTCA systems?

Joe McDevitt, PICMG: The increase in military usage lately in both AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA is certainly what Peter F. Drucker would call an unexpected surprise market. In response, innovative companies within PICMG have embraced this new market opportunity by extending capabilities and support in our standards as evident in the soon-to-be adopted conduction cooled MicroTCA standard. A very similar thing is happening on the physics side, and with nearly all the major telecommunication equipment providers already adopting the specifications, these new markets are the latest important trends for PICMG. Additionally, as we move from the text and voice traffic of the cell phone era to the video traffic of the smart phone era, increasing the bandwidth of AdvancedTCA by releasing 40G enhancements is one the most important things PICMG is currently doing.

Drew Sproul, Adax: The most important trend is economic. For those of us in the U.S. and Europe, it is the emergence from recession. For business in APAC markets, it is the strong continuance of growth, including telecom. Secondly, is the adoption of ATCA as the preferred architecture for next-generation systems. Maturing products and success in design and initial fielding are confirming the promise of ATCA. Thirdly, legacy voice and SMS services will be maintained in the 4G data-driven network build outs. This means that ATCA systems will include ATCA/AMC equipment to support these services in new 4G/LTE/WiMax systems.

Terry Manus, MicroBlade: From an economic perspective, improvement in the global economy has many companies increasing their CAPEX spend to make long overdue investments in their infrastructure. This trend has had a very positive impact on driving engineering and development programs for both ATCA and MTCA. We all can only hope this trend continues. From a technical perspective, the biggest driver has been the ever-increasing demand for increased processing power per U of space. This position has had a significant impact on system-level thermal and power management capabilities. In fact, we have had a few new engagements where the power requirements for a mid-size AMC module are approaching 60 watts.

EE Catalog: How are designers addressing the challenges of building systems to meet new 40 Gigabit demands? What migration strategies are most successful in that evolution?

McDevitt, PICMG: Some significant specification work remains on the 40G effort, but it is moving along nicely. Once that specification work is completed, I think PICMG’s interoperability workshops will play a vital role in helping designers with any interoperability problems, which are always a challenge in any open standard.

Sproul, Adax: Cautiously. 10G system design, integration and fielding using ATCA is only now maturing. The field will use the lessons being learned about the limitations of 10G systems to refine performance requirements that will affect 40G system design. While gathering this data, engineers are busy designing and testing 10G AMC and 40G backplane solutions. We can expect several go-rounds of design, test and re-design over the next couple of years before 40G is ready for prime time.

EE Catalog: What security issues should designers consider in architecting ATCA-based systems?

McDevitt, PICMG: Security is one the chief reasons for separation of control and data plane traffic in AdvancedTCA-based systems, so designers must be mindful to preserve that separation outside the chassis. Additionally, whenever someone mentions security and AdvancedTCA, my mind instantly turns to the shelf manager. Designers should pay extra attention to the access of this device as well.

Sproul, Adax: One of ATCA’s major strengths, IPMI management, is also one of its potential weaknesses. Adding more intelligence to a system adds vulnerabilities. ATCA was designed to allow segregated system control traffic on the Base interface from user data on the Fabric interface. The degree of complexity in the new ATCA systems is much greater than the tightly coupled ones of the past. With the opportunity to have separate blades host individual applications, each one with its own control and management schema, comes just as many potential security weaknesses that system designers must address. Complex systems such as these in corporate and public networks challenge those inclined to breach them. We all need to be aware of these potential threats.

EE Catalog: How do ATCA/MicroTCA compete with VPX in military/aerospace applications?

McDevitt, PICMG: I think there are areas where there will be direct competition. The release of the conduction cooled MicroTCA specification and successful environmental testing of the connector system go a long way to ensuring there will be several overlaps. Adopters will benefit from economies of scale of the MicroTCA side, and since no one is predicting a growth in military budgets this will certainly open even more doors for that adaption. PICMG style system management capability in the xTCA family is currently unmatched by VPX, so that will open doors as well. On the AdvancedTCA side, I’ve heard horror stories of commanders taking their enterprise-based server farms into field deployment areas with disastrous results, and I see AdvancedTCA as a natural solution for that problem. That level of compute power will never be found in VPX systems.

Sproul, Adax: From my limited observations, very well. The AMC/MicroTCA hardening efforts have resulted in products that enjoy significant uptake in the mobile embedded military market. The widening adoption of commercial deployments of AMC and ATCA systems also benefits the price point for military/aerospace adaptation of COTS ATCA equipment.

Manus, MicroBlade: The expanded MicroTCA specifications outlined by MicroTCA.1, MicroTCA.2 and MicroTCA.3 certainly position MicroTCA as a competing architecture against VPX. With the environmental requirements for shock, vibration, temperature and humidity equalized, I believe this competing position will largely come down to cost and availability of a specific solution. In the end, I believe cost will be a huge driver, which in turn will allow MicroTCA to compete very effectively against VPX.

EE Catalog: What’s happening with WiMax and LTE on ATCA-based systems?

McDevitt, PICMG: Many PICMG companies have announced WiMax and LTE solutions and support on ATCA-based system. With late 2011 expected to be the beginning of mass field deployments, I believe good things are just around the corner for these companies.

Sproul, Adax: New designs are focusing heavily on ATCA. The ATCA mantra we’ve all been chanting: scalability, flexibility, redundancy and cost-effectiveness is being rewarded. New systems designs are realizing the benefits of ATCA in these four crucial areas. An additional benefit is that ATCA allows for incorporating vital legacy applications for monitoring, billing, configuration, etc., literally untouched onto separate ATCA SBC blades or virtualized environments. The cost savings are huge. Other legacy applications requiring SS7, SIGTRAN, ATM and Frame Relay/LAPD are being added to LTE/WiMAX ATCA systems in densities and at price points not thought possible before. All in all, the future looks very bright for ATCA-based systems in the next generation telecom marketplace.

Manus, MicroBlade: MicroTCA is a very compelling solution for the wireless base station market in that it provides a high performance platform that can be deployed much less expensively than ATCA. The compact size of the MicroTCA platform coupled with the availability of off-the-shelf technology building blocks used in a wireless base station application essentially make MicroTCA a perfect fit platform. The ability to easily scale to an ATCA platform is an added plus as well.

DeVinney, Interphase: Starting in 2009, we have seen explosive growth in MicroTCA-based WiMAX systems for both commercial networks as well as “hardened” versions for military and municipal government solutions. The strong demand for these systems coupled with the AdvancedMC ecosystem available to the market allowed system integrators to quickly and cost-effectively deploy wireless networking coverage. Starting at Mobile World Congress 2011, Interphase and other AMC suppliers will begin demonstrating “live” over-the-air LTE demos. These demonstrations are an important proof point of the maturity of the MicroTCA marketplace to serve the needs of equipment suppliers required to almost immediately begin delivering LTE gear to service providers looking to begin field trials in the first half of this year.

Cheryl Berglund Coupé is Editor of EECatalog. com. Her articles have appeared in EE Times, Electronic Business, Microsoft Embedded Review and Windows Developer’s Journal and she has developed presentations for the Embedded Systems Conference and ICSPAT. She has held a variety of production, technical marketing and writing positions within technology companies and agencies in the Northwest.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 at 9:03 am and is filed under Article.