Advances in developing next-generation electronics standards for physics

The Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) open standard developed by an industry consortium is beginning to find new applications in non-telecom fields including accelerators, HEP detectors, medical physics, astrophysics, fusion and similar applications. At the same time the broad physics community needs to modernize the capabilities of standard platforms for the future. This paper describes the formation of a lab-industry collaborative effort to extend ATCA specifications into the physics field for greater reliability and availability of next-generation machines and detectors, to improve the interoperability of instruments developed at different laboratories, and to take advantage of the potentially broad base of ATCA industry support for physics products.