Doomsayers may call the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture dead in the water, but at least one vendor at this week’s ATCA Summit wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. CommAgility gave the world a double whammy of Virtex-5-based designs, one for general Advanced Mezzanine Card use, including one aimed specifically at fiber-based 10-Gbit links for wireless backhaul.

The AMC-V5Fe is distinguished by marrying the Virtex-5 with a high-speed 4x PCI Express interface, and dual Gigabit Ethernet links. Like its 10-Gbit cousin, the card features CPRI/OBSAI-compliant fiber links for wireless backhaul, but is also designed for range of general communication tasks. CommAgility based the AMC on the Virtex LX110T because of its ability to boot from flash memory on reset from one of four configuration images.

The AMC-V5F-10G also features CPRI/OBSAI interface, but uses an SFP+ connector for the fastest speeds of backhaul aggregation. It can handle a single 10G Ethernet link, or as many as 16 CPRI links. The LX110T used in this design offers dual SFP interfaces from the FPGA, but the card itself can interface with other modules via either Serial RapidIO or PCI Express.

First, it’s nice to see developers breathe some life into ATCA/MicroTCA infrastructures. But even if this standard gets swamped over time by VPX and FMC, it’s fun to watch the mezzanine card form factor become the carrier module of choice for future communication needs. And even if telecom and enterprise markets for 10G Ethernet stay flat for a little while, OEMs like CommAgility recognize there’s always wireless backhaul.