Advantech wins Best of Show Award at ATCA Summit

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UTCA-6302 MicroTCA System is rewarded for Best Unique Customer Application

Advantech, one of the leading global manufacturers of customizable telecom computing blades and multi-core network platforms, announced that they have been awarded a prestigious “Best of Show Award” at the ATCA Summit for “Best Unique Customer Application” with the Vanu Anywave BTS. Advantech's uniquely engineered UTCA-6302 system incorporates up to twelve of the latest 45nm Intel® Core™ 2 Duo based processors in full-size AMC format for optimal cooling in just a 3U or 4U form factor. The system introduces an innovative front-to-rear cooling scheme, advanced redundant power design andis fitted with new generation redundant Intelligent MicroTCA Carrier Hubs (MCH) providing Quad Gigabit Ethernet, encryption and Quad T1/E1 backhaul.

“We are honored to have received the ATCA Summit Committee's award” said Peter Marek, Director of Advantech's Blade Computing Division who accepted the trophy on behalf of Advantech. He congratulated the development teams involved and added "The engineering teams in Germany and in Taiwan did a great job to meet some aggressive project deadlines and stringent design-to-cost goals without sacrificing functionality. The system architecture provides significant performance headroom with 12 full-size payload slots for Processor AMCs and it meets the processing requirements for Software Defined Radio (SDR) whilst providing advanced levels of reliability”.

SDR is a concept that has excited mobile operators for many years, offering benefits such as support for new waveforms through software upgrades, fastertime-to-market for new network services, and reduced maintenance costs due to remote upgrades and management. With Vanu's approach the flexibility of a software RAN is taken one step further to allow virtualization of the BTS platform for sharing by multiple mobile operators. Hardware resources are reserved for each mobile operator using the system and each virtual BTS (vBTS) is isolated from the others running on the platform, enabling each operator to independently manage and monitor its vBTS.

To facilitate multi-vendor RAN sharing and common operator understanding of equipment functionality, an open standard platform architecture using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) is important. Advantech's UTCA-6302 MicroTCA system was designed to meet all environmental and regulatory requirements for best current practice and in addition ensures improved levels of availability. Hardware scalability and the available interconnects allow for higher capacity provisioning and provide fullscope for longer-term serviceability. The system's failover mechanisms, hot-swap functions and manageability layers all adhere to open standard definitions, allowing uptime goals to be met and open interfaces to be used for remote management purposes.

Ernie Bergstrom of Crystal Cube Consulting LLC and ATCA Summit Chairman added “We chose Advantech's UTCA-6302 for the Best Unique Customer Application Award because of its unique advantages of Software Defined Radio technology on open platforms using general purpose processors. In addition it demonstrates an innovative optimized MicroTCA deployment platform, making it economical for SDR whilst conforming to and retaining all the advantages of an open standard specification.”

For more information, visit Advantech networks and telecom at www.advantech.com/NC or E-mail to NCG@advantech.com.