Industry Insights

RapidIO’s Bus Architecture Complements ATCA’s Platform Development

By Ernie Bergstrom, Vice President Research And Chief Analyst, Crystal Cube Consulting

The combination of Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) and RapidIO’s serial I/O high-speed bus architecture can make telecommunications networks faster and more robust. The efforts of groups such as the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), and RapidIO Trade Association, as well as the other high-speed architectures under development, complement the ATCA open standard that specifies high-speed backplanes and chassis. RapidIO’s deployment strategy for 2006 includes focusing on supporting ATCA’s high-speed backplane, which offers better middleware, management-ware, and host-based options, making it easier to build feature-rich, scalable, high-availability converged communications applications.

At the application level, the industry, driven by customer demand, has focused recently on simplifying open systems development. The idea has been to provide backplanes, as in the case with the RapidIO interconnect, as well as, chassis, housings, resource components, middleware, and management systems that interoperate in standard ways, and offer high performance at reasonable cost.

The telecommunications industry is moving toward an environment in which application and design engineers can confidently assemble platforms from off-the-shelf hardware and software solutions. Such key ingredients as density, bus types, DSP and CPU horsepower, and operating systems, will all be governed by well-established standards. To date RapidIO has taken the lead in developing a high-speed bus standard solution shipping in products operating well above the Ethernet 1GigE bus offering and certainly way ahead of any 10GigE standard. Additionally, standardization for power and cooling, form factor, connector types, cable routing, maintainability, availability, and security will be essential. The Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs) need to know that customers can simply pick and choose the platforms they need with high-speed standards available and on board.

ATCA will be a major driver, along with RapidIO’s serial I/O standard high-speed bus architecture, in helping the telecom sector in fueling future growth for the entire supply chain. ATCA is an ambitious effort, but the move to standards fulfills an obvious need. As the PICMG 3.X specifications progresses toward standardizing a hardware platform and interconnects, OEMs will embrace starting new designs due to the direct savings in their development cycles. Standards-based technology plays an essential role, enabling equipment manufacturers to realize substantial cost savings – and service providers to benefit directly from those savings.

A next-generation, high-bandwidth, low-latency local interconnect standard is without question a definite necessity. Each competing standard will stand or fall based on its own merits in its target applications or market segments. The high-speed bus standards will be evaluated individually in terms of cost, support infrastructure, performance, scalability, ease of use, time to market, and capabilities. Crystal Cube Consulting (CCC) has been researching the high-speed bus architecture standards since 2003, and projected then that RapidIO would lead the charge in the embedded space, which has proven to be the case.

CCC offers several reports on AdvancedTCA, Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMC), and MicroTCA. Our reports include profiles of the major TEMs, chip providers, and module suppliers, and a five-year forecast of growth and unit shipments for the major application areas. We are very encouraged by the new open-system standards and see the opportunity for a $14 billion market for AMC’s and a 40 billion dollar market for ATCA by year-end 2010. For more details, please visit our site at http://www.crystalcubeconsulting.com.

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