SCOPE Alliance

GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms is an entity within GE Fanuc, a joint venture established over 20 years between General Electric and the Japanese company FANUC. Today, from its headquarters in Virginia, the company has built up a reputation as one of the leading global providers of hardware and software designed for embedded computing. Throughout its existence, GE Fanuc has sought to provide cutting edge technology solutions in all its core areas of businesses. Key to its success has been its work in the embedded systems space, an area which the company splits between the military/government sectors and the communications/industrial systems sectors. GE Fanuc aims to provide engineered solutions that allow customers to reduce time to market and increase the competitiveness of their products – and a vital strategic imperative across all GE Fanuc’s lines of business is to support industry standards in both hardware and software. These standards are the foundation for extensive ranges of COTS (commercial off the shelf) solutions.

Industry standards are designed to bring with them a broad range of benefits. Competition among suppliers is one of these, ensuring that new technologies are brought to market quickly and at low prices. Industry standards create an ecosystem of supporting expertise and services that further increase the attractiveness of adopting those standards. Perhaps most importantly, however, industry standards are designed to promote interoperability – allowing customers to ‘mix and match’ offerings from a range of vendors to create systems that are uniquely suited to the application.

That, at least, is the theory. The reality, however, is somewhat different. Because industry standards are, by definition, designed to be applicable in a broad range of environments, they also typically allow some flexibility in interpretation and implementation. That is certainly true for the PICMG standards for AdvancedTCA (ATCA) – an architecture that has found significant favour in telecommunications applications.

The PICMG standards were published by the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), a consortium of companies that collaboratively develop open specifications for high performance telecommunications and industrial computing hardware applications. PICMG defines the design parameters for the ATCA blades and AdvancedMC modules produced by companies like GE Fanuc, whose communications business provides hardware equipment for Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) such as Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks and Nortel. Its core products are AdvancedMC modules and AdvancedTCA (ATCA) blades which are sold to NEPs to develop ATCA chassis and racks. NEPs add layers of software, creating sophisticated telecommunication equipment such as gateways and switches. This network infrastructure equipment is then sold to service providers. Such gateways have become an important part of Carrier Grade Base Platforms (CGBPs) allowing service providers to improve network capacity, have higher power allowance, generate more advanced power distribution and benefit from lower total cost of ownership.

Designing standards-based solutions for this broad and diverse market has, historically, been a challenge – a function of the flexibility intentionally built into the PICMG specification. AdvancedTCA may be an industry standard – but the definition still left the designer with numerous decisions to make about the specifics of his implementation, and to make them quickly, given the dynamic nature of a demanding industry. Excellent application knowledge and close customer contact helped this process, of course, but it was still possible to be blind-sided on occasions.

With the advent of the SCOPE Alliance – of which GE Fanuc is a member - those occasions have been reduced to zero. The SCOPE Alliance was formed in 2006 with the twin aims of better defining the PICMG standards and helping to support companies engaged in the production of components for CGBPs. SCOPE’s membership includes not only NEPs such as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, NEC and Nokia Siemens Networks but also equipment suppliers such as GE Fanuc and technology providers such as Intel and Freescale. The over-riding goal of the SCOPE Alliance is to create the widest possible variety of PICMG-compliant products as possible - while ensuring that all modules and blades within the chassis were interoperable.

To this end, SCOPE publishes documents that specifically define the key content and characteristics of those PICMG-based components needed by the telecoms industry. To date, SCOPE’s activities have been mainly in the area of defining profiles and gaps for PICMG 3.0 - AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC as well as μTCA (MicroTCA). The definitions provided by SCOPE remove the possibility of being blind-sided, and allow GE Fanuc to ensure that hardware designs are suitable for all NEPs, and to bring those designs to market more quickly and at lower cost. Membership of the Alliance works to GE Fanuc’s advantage – and, of course, it works to the advantage of GE Fanuc’s customers.

The SCOPE Alliance has regular member meetings and is open to all members and associated systems manufacturers, providing an invaluable forum for companies like GE Fanuc to not only increase understanding of trends, directions and requirements in the industry, but also to influence them.

In summary: the SCOPE Alliance provides a bridge between PICMG standards and the precise requirements of end customers, allowing better solutions to be developed more quickly and at lower cost. Most importantly, it ensures that not only are the competitive and ecosystem benefits of open systems based on industry standards achieved, but also the key benefit of guaranteed interoperability.