You’ve done this before. There’s an industry conference with some new information you just can’t live without – say the latest news on 40G AdvancedTCA. Only a couple of sessions interest you, but you decide to go anyway. You get up at 4 A.M., rush to get dressed, drive to the airport, wait at the ticket counter, wait at security, and wait at the gate. Then drink a bad cup of something resembling coffee. You join the other sardines on the plane and spend the flight with a seatback in your face. Deplane at your destination airport and wait for a cab. There is a lot of traffic and you arrive at the conference 15 minutes after the presentation you really wanted to hear began. You hang around the conference all day and grab another cab for the airport during afternoon rush hour. You wait for your flight and eventually get home at 10 P.M. What a lovely day. There has got to be a better way. Now there is.

Rewind to that 4 A.M. wakeup call. Hit the snooze button (Figure 1) and get up at your usual time. Wander off to your study with a cup of coffee and fire up the computer. You are working from home today because you are attending OpenSystems Media’s AdvancedTCA Virtual Summit. This day long event will cover a wide range of topics including wireless apps, 4G, LTE, systems integration, network acceleration, and the aforementioned 40G AdvancedTCA. There is even an Executive Roundtable so you can hear the views of industry leaders. You can post questions and get live answers. There are breaks between sessions so that you can handle e-mail and phone calls.

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This is exactly what happened on June 24th when OpenSystems Media together with Conference ConCepts held the first AdvancedTCA Virtual Summit. Six hundred and fourteen registrants listened to twelve speakers and five industry executives and saw presentations detailing the latest advances and trends in AdvancedTCA. Technologies like AdvancedTCA provide the high communications bandwidths that make events like this possible. The increasing hassle and expense of business travel today make virtual conferences like these a welcome development.

Half a grin

Regarding 40G AdvancedTCA, many of you may have noted the flurry of product announcements of late claiming 40G performance. Part of me is grinning as 40G capability is the next big thing for ATCA and will be necessary to feed the ever-increasing appetite for bandwidth for a wide range of applications, many of them mobile. The squeeze is real, as evidenced in part by a recent announcement that AT&T will no longer offer unlimited flat rate data plans. Part of me is groaning, however, because the standards work being done by PICMG to create the 40G specification is not complete and likely won’t be done before the end of the year. A completed specification is necessary to ensure multivendor interoperability of system elements, and that interoperability is essential for AdvancedTCA’s long-term success.

In other AdvancedTCA related news, I’m happy to announce that the VITA 46.11 working group, which is responsible for developing the Hardware Platform Management (HPM) architecture for OpenVPX, has chosen the AdvancedTCA/MicroTCA HPM architecture as the basis for their standard. This will come as good news for vendors who are developing both xTCA and OpenVPX products, as their software development efforts in this area can largely overlap. HPM is a critical foundation for high availability architectures, and AdvancedTCA was the first open commercial architecture to provide HA. Interestingly, the requirement for HA came from the telecommunications world, which has been using it for a long time, albeit in proprietary implementations. Now mil and aerospace applications can benefit from telecommunications requirements.

Joe Pavlat, Editorial Director