Vadatech opens £4m UK integration centre

Vadatech has opened a £4m centre in Southampton to integrate ATCA and microTCA systems for European customers.

US microTCA board and systems developer Vadatech has opened a £4m building in Southampton, UK, that will be its European integration centre.

The operation will expand from five staff to 15 to 20 as a result, said Saeed Karamooz, CEO, including test and field applications engineers. “With microTCA and ATCA there’s more to the integration than just putting the boards together in a conduction cooled chassis,” he said. “The cabling can cost as much as the rest of the system so it’s essential to provide the complete system.”

The centre will integrate custom chassis-level products that combine the power sub-systems with Vadatech’s processing, sensor and data acquisition cards. The company supplies companies such as Qualcomm with basestation emulation systems and complete systems for UAVs for Boeing using the telecoms-based ATCA and microTCA commercial board formats for an eco-system of over 300 products, as well as supplying systems for high energy physics at CERN in Switzerland.

In January the company announced a move into the 3U VPX form factor. This allows defence customers in the US and Europe to take field-proven designs in another standard format with strong market adoption. The initial product offerings will focus on its strength in data acquisition and sensor processing, followed by storage and networking. In addition, VadaTech’s FMC modules are also applicable in the VPX form factor.  It has launched 12 VPX products so far. Providing designs in both AMC and VPX offers a straightforward migration route between the standards and design re-use across the form factors allows the cmpany to amortize development over larger volumes than other defense-centric COTS providers. “Telecoms pays for the research and development os it’s truly a COTS product,” said Karamooz.

www.vadatech.com