Advanced TCA: The New Comm Platform

March 3, 2003

PICMG's (www.picmg.org) Advanced TCA (Telecom Computing Architecture) is a massive new specification that targets next-generation carrier-grade equipment. While proprietary hardware dominates this market, the move to standards-based platforms...

William G. Wong

PICMG's (www.picmg.org) Advanced TCA (Telecom Computing Architecture) is a massive new specification that targets next-generation carrier-grade equipment. While proprietary hardware dominates this market, the move to standards-based platforms is clear. CompactPCI has made inroads, but its smaller form factor limits its use in high-end systems. Advanced TCA provides more area and power. The base 3.0 specification defines the hardware while additional specifications define interconnects.

ADVANCED TCA SPECIFICATIONS
3.0	Defines overall mechanics, board dimensions, power distribution, power and data connectors, and system management plus 10/100/1000BaseT Ethernet connections
3.1	Ethernet fabric (dual star or mesh)
3.2	InfiniBand (dual star or mesh)
3.3	StarFabric (dual star or mesh)
3.4	PCI Express Advanced Switching (dual star or mesh)

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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