VDC Research Group's Embedded Hardware practice attended the ATCA Summit in Santa Clara, CA last week. This show always presents a great chance to catch up on the latest happenings of the entire ATCA ecosystem as it brings together virtually all of the important ATCA technology players. The themes that were most clear to VDC at this year's Summit were the move towards ever faster bandwidth (currently the inevitable move to 40Gigabit Ethernet) and the growing up of the ATCA software ecosystem.
It was apparent that the industry will soon be ready to move from 10 GbE to 40 GbE with various vendors displaying their latest hardware that will enable the move to 40GbE. Both Emerson Network Power's Embedded Computing Division and RadiSys announced new 40GbE integrated systems. Emerson Network Power announced the next generation of its Centellis 2000 ATCA platform, which is a two slot ATCA system featuring a 40GbE backplane. RadiSys meanwhile announced the availability of full sized ATCA integrated systems complete with 40GbE backplanes and 40GbE switch blades.  ELMA Bustronic was also exhibiting 40GbE with its latest highspeed ATCA backplane, capable of 40GbE speeds. It is obvious that with the move to 4G/LTE that the requirement for speeds of 40GbE and faster is rapidly approaching and these firms along with other ATCA vendors will be soon be securing LTE and other 4G design wins with such 40GbE ATCA platforms. VDC's own current projections show that today the ATCA market is at the inflection point where 10GbE is now used in more new ATCA designs than 1 GbE and that real deployment of 40GbE ATCA systems will begin in earnest in 2011 with an inflection point coming 2013 when 40GbE will overtake 10GbE in the majority of new ATCA designs.

The importance of the ATCA ecosystem improving its software component has been obvious to VDC for some time and it was obvious at the Summit that much work continues to be done in this area. The software infrastructure available from the ATCA ecosystem today still lags the hardware infrastructure, but there are many firms and industry organizations working hard to close that gap. VDC believes that for ATCA to achieve its full potential a more robust offering of commercial software solutions is needed around the hardware platforms available. Much has already been done in the area of commercial real-time middleware by both GoAhead Software and ENEA, but other pieces of the software puzzle are still needed. One of great important is the need for true real-time virtualization for ATCA platforms. We met with the SA Forum and OpenSAF foundations during the show to learn about the latest development at these organizations and both are making important strides in enabling a stronger ATCA software ecosystem. The work of these organizations should continue to be elevated by both vendors and customers alike as customer feedback can be invaluable for foundations of this sort and the work they are doing will make life much easier for ATCA users in the long run.

Two other firms focused on software's importance in enabling ATCA platforms at the Summit were Continuous Computing (CCPU) and Diversified Technology (DTI). CCPU continues to focus on its Trillium protocol software as an important part of its ATCA integrated systems and also confirmed that LTE business is picking up for ATCA as they are seeing adoption in some new LTE applications. DTI announced an enhanced software suite and support for its 10GbE switch blade as the market has moved rapidly to 10GbE solutions today as noted earlier.

MicroTCA also had a prominent role at the Summit. Kontron announced a carrier-grade 1U MicroTCA platform that comes pre-validated with Cavium-based AMC modules. Meanwhile, Advantech announced a new 26-core MicroTCA platform in a 3U package and CommAgility announced the release of a high performance FPGA-based interface and processing AMC that can provide speeds up to 10GbE for MicroTCA platforms.

So as you can see this year's ATCA Summit was a great sampling of the innovation that has occurred all year long in the ATCA ecosystem even in the face of the recession. Look for things to get even more exciting as 4G rollout ramps up in late 2010 and 2011, as this will create a massive deployment of brand new network infrastructure the size of which we have not seen for many years and of which ATCA is poised to capture a substantial piece.