SCOPE Alliance

Established in 1962 and growing through acquisitions, Kontron designs and manufactures embedded computer systems. It was also one of the companies that founded of the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) a consortium of companies who collaboratively develop open common specifications for high performance telecommunications and industrial computing applications.

The company is also heavily involved in the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA), which accelerates the adoption of SIG- governed, open specification-based communications platforms through interoperability testing and certification.

Being part of PICMG means that Kontron, along with other group members, has been influential in developing a series of specifications for the computer industry including AdvancedTCA® and AdvancedMC™ standard products.

With this in mind, PICMG has worked closely with the SCOPE Alliance in its process of developing profiles and gap analysis for its specifications. To date, SCOPE’s activities have been mainly around PICMG 3.0 - AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC as well as µTCA (MicroTCA).

An important part of the SCOPE Alliance’s work has been to describe the hardware profiles of these specifications and push for compatible modules. Several profiles for ATCA, µTCA and AMC’s have been published by the SCOPE Alliance and the purpose of these documents is to provide guidelines to standardization bodies, vendors and end users who want to migrate from proprietary solutions to PICMG’s open standard based platforms.

Today PICMG encourages all its members, including Kontron, to build ATCAs and AMCs on SCOPE recommendations which are a strict requirement of all tier one telecoms operators and manufacturers. It also usually forms part of the request for proposal (RFP) process from customers so it is important that solutions comply with these recommendations.

Building PICMG’s products based on SCOPE’s recommendations also gives products more traction in the market. The benefits of all this is that a wide range of third party components fit together into these platforms meaning a wider adoption rate by customers and more revenue for the industry.

In line with this, the CP-TA plans to drive a mainstream market for open industry standards-based communications platforms by certifying interoperable products based on existing open industry standards from organizations such as PICMG and the SA Forum, and to the system-level profiles developed by SCOPE. The CP-TA intends to enable the next level of multi-vendor interoperability by certifying building block compliance to this industry-developed framework for base platform profiles.

Sven Freudenfeld, president of the CP-TA, said, “We at CP-TA have a close relationship with SCOPE, taking their recommendations and enforcing them into standards and specifications to encourage true interoperability between components. The requirements from SCOPE give guidance on how to interoperate multiple vendors into one platform. This gives the end user the benefit of choosing from multiple vendors when buying products and addresses the technical gaps in the interoperability challenge. As such, this benefits the whole ecosystem with the majority of manufacturers adopting the SCOPE recommendations in terms of AdvancedTCA. Today there is a tight relationship between the two organizations so we can address mainstream adoption of certain standards and specifications.”