January 31, 2000, Issue: 1098
Section: News
Spec is in the works for telecom mezzanine card
David Lieberman
BOSTON - A variation on the popular IEEE 1386.1 PCI Mezzanine Card
(PMC) standard is being developed for telecommunications markets by
Performance Technologies Inc. and Motorola Computer Group (Tempe, Ariz.).
Dubbed PTMC, for PCI Telecom Mezzanine Card, the spec will retain the
standard PMC definitions for the Pn1 and Pn2 connectors, while defining
pin-outs on the optional Pn3 and Pn4 connectors to implement either an ATM
bus or H.110 computer-telephony bus interface.
DSP-board specialists Spectrum Signal Processing Inc. and Blue Wave
Systems Inc. are said to be seriously looking at the PTMC form factor.
"The PTMC is the latest incremental advance in the industry effort to leverage
the success, form factor and functionality of PCI mezzanine cards to speed
development, create product flexibility and lower the cost of multipurpose
computer platforms," said Martin McFadden, vice president of Performance
Technologies (Rochester, N.Y.).
The motivation behind the effort, McFadden said, is "to provide an industry
standard from which designers, manufacturers and integrators will have a
common platform for implementing a variety of telecommunications hardware
or specialized voice and data applications."
"By supporting two popular, industry-standard telecom bus interfaces [ATM and
H.110] unavailable under the existing PMC specification, the PTMC makes a
leap in standardization," McFadden said. "Rather than needing to choose
between competing hardware architectures to support standard telecom and
telephony interfaces, adapter vendors and developers can select PTMC
modules with options to suit desired applications and functionality."
A spokesman for Performance Technologies said activity on the standard has
reached the "preliminary draft proposal" stage. "We've been working on this for
six months or so. It grew out of a need to provide some incremental functions to
our T1, T3 and ATM controllers such as DSP for echo cancellation,
compression, etc., and for adding more processor power to our controller
cards."
Performance Technologies plans to use PTMC for an ATM physical-layer
board and an inverse-mux ATM board, the company spokesman said. The
PTMC draft spec has been distributed to "a number of companies," he said.
Once a final PTMC spec is completed, it will be submitted to either the PCI
Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group or the VMEbus Standards
Organization (VSO) for standardization, the spokesman added.
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