The AdvancedTCA market came into its own during 2004 and reached a level of maturity where vendors began updating existing shelf designs from development versions to deployment versions.

This market is going through a dynamic period where customers and vendors are searching for the best combination of features while keeping design complexity and costs to a minimum.

The primary goal in developing the ATCA specification was to create a scaleable architecture that balances performance and cost for high performance, high power telecom networking applications. Although the ATCA specification was written for the Central Office telecom market, there is increasing interest in this packaging technology for non-telecom applications. Engineers outside the telecom industry are attracted to the design, power distribution, board size, and fabric architecture of ATCA. and are designing proprietary boards that work in ATCA shelves. However, at the system and board level, these engineers may be selective in which ATCA features are incorporated since they don’t need all of the functionality and/or want to reduce overall system cost.