Fabric technologies reach the mezzanine level

摘要

A NEW MEZZANINE-CARD FAMILY OFFERS DESIGNERS STANDARD PLUG-IN MODULES WITH HIGH AVAILABILITY, HOT-SWAP FUNCTIONS, AND MULTIPLE SWITCHED-FABRIC OPTIONS. Telecom-equipment engineers are transforming their industry from proprietary systems with long, expensive development cycles to standards-based designs using low-cost, off-the-shelf products. The first step was a new board, backplane, and software standard dubbed the Ad-vancedTCA (Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture) with a large-board form factor, high-availability features, a distributed-pow-er architecture, system management, and switched-fabric performance. Their latest innovation, the AdvancedMC (Advanced Mezzanine Card) standard, extends many of these same features onto replaceable plug-in modules or daughter-cards to form a complete system-design package for telecom and other applications requiring high performance.