AdvancedTCA Passes Muster with the Military

By Brian Wood, CP-TA

The US military, one of the world’s largest electronics and communications markets, is currently undergoing major change. In the past, military acquisition called for purpose-built equipment designed by a single contractor for a specific application at the lowest possible cost. Unfortunately, the resulting proprietary systems often could not interoperate or exchange data easily. Designing them from scratch also took a long time and often resulted in deployments that were far behind commercial equivalents technologically. This lag as well as the high cost of maintenance and upgrading has prompted the U.S. military to often require designs based on Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) products and technologies.

The ideal COTS technology would offer commercial design features readily adaptable to military applications, a modular architecture to provide design flexibility while minimizing supply and maintenance logistics, and a diverse, competitive vendor base to keep costs down and innovation high, and ensure multiple sources of supply. Past experience has shown, however, that multi-vendor interoperability issues can quickly erode these benefits and force designers back to proprietary approaches.

The increasing emphasis on cooperation with and reliance on allies, coupled with the ongoing need to handle information from a wide array of sources, makes interoperability vital in the US military market. And AdvancedTCA, with the support of the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA), is proving its ability to deliver it.

Although AdvancedTCA’s central office-derived specifications are not as stringent as the military’s environmental requirements, they are suitable for most installations. AdvancedTCA-based systems have already proven themselves fully able to meet the needs of off-battlefield sheltered environments (such as shipboard or airborne). BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, and Hughes Networks have publicly declared the adoption of AdvancedTCA in some of their deployed military systems for such applications.

AdvancedTCA fulfills all the requirements of a COTS solution for many of today’s military market demands. It is modular, flexible, and widely supported, meets the ruggedness requirements of most applications, and simplifies both maintenance and system evolution. It is an established and technically robust architecture with industry support to ensure multi-vendor interoperability and continued technical evolution. It has also been field-proven both in its original commercial application and in several military systems.

CP-TA, through continued development and testing of specifications and certification standards, has helped ensure that AdvancedTCA offers the military and other markets the interoperable products they demand. CP-TA’s membership base is actively involved in developing AdvancedTCA products for telecom, military, aerospace, and government system applications.

To join us in this important work, please visit CP-TA’s web site at www.cp-ta.org.

Brian Wood is Marketing Work Group chair for the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA). You may contact him via Karen Riley at kriley@nereus-worldwide.com.