MicroTCA

MicroTCA is a new open modular standard developed by the PICMG and complementary to the PICMG 3.0 Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA). Whereas AdvancedTCA is optimized for very high capacity applications, MicroTCA is designed to address cost sensitive and physically smaller applications with lower capacity and performance requirements.

A modular platform for high-end applications

MicroTCA preserves many of the important philosophies of AdvancedTCA, including basic interconnect topologies and management structure. MicroTCA has a primary purpose of serving as a platform for telecommunications and enterprise computer network equipment. Its secondary goal is to function as a high-performance system architecture for other demanding marketplaces like Medical, Military and Automation. By configuring highly diverse collections of AdvancedMCs in a MicroTCA Shelf, many different application architectures can be realized easily. The common elements defined by the MicroTCA standard are capable of interconnecting these AdvancedMCs in many interesting ways - powering and managing them, all at high efficiency and reasonable cost.

The design goals are your benefits

The PICMG MicroTCA specification was written with the following design goals in mind:

• Complementary to AdvancedTCA
• Full compliance with the AMC.0 Module definition
• Reasonable cost, size and modularity
• Modular and serviceable
• Standardized Shelf management implementation compatible with AdvancedTCA
• Cooling: 20–80 W per AdvancedMC slot
• Support for extended temperature range
• Scalable Backplane bandwidth
• Various backplane topologies: Star, Dual Star, Mesh
• Hot Swap/plug-and-play support, in conformance with AMC.0 and consistent with AdvancedTCA