RECENT CP-TA ACTIVITIES

By Sven Freudenfeld, CP-TA/Kontron

The Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA) recently reached an important milestone in its mission to continually improve off-the-shelf interoperability for AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA, and Advanced components.

CP-TA has released updated (3.0) versions of its flagship interoperability documents, the Interoperability Compliance Document (ICD) and the Test Procedure Manual (TPM). They outline industry-standard criteria and testing procedures for AdvancedTCA building blocks.

For simplicity, the new versions are mapped directly to the PICMG 3.0 Revision 3.0 ATCA Base Specification. Test procedures are now structured on a one-to-one basis with sections of the specification. Additionally, requirements not found in the specification have been removed, and several ambiguous requirements have been clarified. These are helpful improvements.

The included mandatory test cases will help system integrators identify what they must do to make a project pass interoperability testing. Each procedure is described in detail and mapped to the requirement numbers in the PICMG specification for ease of reporting.

The ICD is available to download for free, and the TPM is available to download for a fee on the CP-TA Web site. For more information about CP-TA and these documents, please visit www.cp-ta.org/certification .

CP-TA also recently held 2009 officer elections. The newly installed officers are:

President: Sven Freudenfeld, Kontron
Secretary: Nirlay Kundu, Emerson Network Power
Treasurer: Jim Lawrence, ENEA
Marketing: Brian Wood, Continuous Computing
Director: Anthony Ambrose, RadiSys
Director: Todd Keaffaber, Intel

CP-TA is looking forward to continually enhancing the performance and cost-effectiveness of AdvancedTCA solutions through our interoperability work and collaboration with peer groups such as the SCOPE Alliance, PICMG, and Service Availability (SA) Forum.

Contact us to find out more about how YOU can get involved in CP-TA!

Sven Freudenfeld is President of the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA). You may contact him via Joe Saylor at jsaylor@nereus-worldwide.com.