Patent ID: 7821790

Claim:
A chassis for providing electrical, mechanical and environmental housing for Telecom Computing Architecture (TCA) compliant modules, the chassis comprising: a first unit chassis compliant with a TCA standard and having a first form factor that defines a front side and a back side of the first unit chassis and adapted to house a plurality of TCA compliant modules, including at least one module that provides power and control to at least the plurality of modules housed in the first unit chassis; a second unit chassis compliant with the TCA standard and the first form factor that defines a front side and a back side of the second unit chassis and adapted to house a plurality of TCA compliant modules, including a rear transition module; a transition board that operably couples to the rear transition module, the transition board including a single board computer; and a shared backplane that operably couples the back side of the first unit chassis with the transition board at the back side of the second unit chassis, the shared backplane including printed circuitry operable to provide data communications between the plurality of modules housed within the first unit chassis and at least one module housed within the second unit chassis.