With the MicroTCA™ specification approved and the number of suppliers increasing, the market for AdvancedMC™ (AMC) modules, looks set to expand beyond the telecommunications sector.
MicroTCA differs a lot from its predecessor peers and brings some interesting technology from the telecommunications sector. This article provides a technology overview and takes a look at what makes MicroTCA so compelling.
The pervasive and agile form factor of AMCs, their serviceability attributes and the use of hi-speed serial interconnects are paving the way for their innovative re-use in diverse system topologies, both standard and proprietary.
So as AMCs provoke the compelling event for next generation designs, this article takes a look at some of the key factors which are at the forefront of the decision-making process.
As the MicroTCA specification states, it has a primary purpose of serving as a platform for telecommunications and enterprise computer network equipment. Its secondary goal is to function as a platform for other demanding marketplaces. |
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MicroTCA is complementary to AdvancedTCA, where AdvancedTCA is optimized for very high capacity, high
performance applications, MicroTCA is designed to address cost sensitive and physically smaller applications with
lower capacity, performance, and perhaps less stringent availability requirements. MicroTCA preserves many of the
important philosophies of AdvancedTCA, including basic interconnect topologies and management structure.
AMCs are the primary component of MicroTCA. The ability to use any AMCs that conform to the AdvancedMC standard without modification in MicroTCA is an over arching goal of the standard.
Examples of AMCs that could be installed into a MicroTCA shelf include CPUs for control and feature processing, network processing units for packet processing and I/O, DSP AMCs for signal processing, storage AMCs with built-in disk or flash or interfaces to external storage arrays, and various I/O AMCs, such as subscriber lines, Ethernet, or optical networking.
MicroTCA offers a significant advantage because the same AMCs that connect directly to the MicroTCA Backplane can also be equipped on an AdvancedTCA Carrier Board. |