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Welcome to the Engineers’
Guide to VME, VPX & VXS 2013
The trends in VME are clear: systems are migrating to high-speed fabric interconnects
using PCI Express, Serial RapidIO, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet on platforms such as VPX
(VITA 46) and OpenVPX (VITA 65). While copper is still the preferred data plane material,
lots of work is going into optical interconnects of spaghetti fiber on the backplane. As well,
VME vendors are offering all manner of pre-packaged rugged boxes—the term I coined
is “shoeboxes”—which may or may not contain 6U, 3U VME or VPX. In fact, they might
contain anything, including one of the several Working Group VITA standards: 73, 74, or 75.
The challenge, of course, is dealing with the requisite I/O, heat, and environmentals.
I love VME, and have been associated with the ecosystem for nearly 25 years. That’s why
when colleague Michael Munroe from Elma Bustronic offered up “VPX Backplanes Go
Optical” I jumped on the chance to include it here. Michael’s an expert on all manner of
PHY and signaling on VME and VPX. Curtiss-Wright describes how VPX is “Bringing HPC
Technology to Mil-Aero Embedded Deployment”, and since power is what drives everything,
Dawn VME gives us an overview of “VITA 62 Power Supplies: Filling a Standards
Gap for 3U VPX Systems”.
As mentioned, heat is a killer in all of these systems so Mentor Graphics, the recent
acquirer of FloTHERM and other CFD-related tools, presents an excellent overview of
“Tackling the Challenge of Building...Avionics with CFD”. This one’s a must-read.
Yet hardware’s not the only game in VME and VPX. I ran into MultiCoreWare at an AMD
conference and twisted a few arms to get them to talk about programming in OpenCL
in their article “Performance-Portable Programming”. And we give an “attaboy” (and
“attagirl”) to the VME community for being “Agile” before it was popular, as evidenced
by the article “The Softer Side of Agile” penned by ESI International.
Last, but not least: be sure to read our insightful Round table Q&A featuring commentary
by friends from Aitech and Curtiss-Wright in my article “VME’s Long From Dead;
Destined to Co-Exist with VPX and Serial Fabrics”.
Of course, that’s not all—this issue is full of product news, datasheets, events and other
resources to keep you up to date with the latest in programmable logic. As always, we’d
love to hear your feedback, thoughts and comments. Send them to info@extensionmedia.com.
Thanks for joining us by reading.
Chris A. C iufo, Editor
cciufo@extensionmedia.com
PS: Watch for InfiniBand on VPX; it’s a trend I’m following closely in the blog
www.eecatalog.com/caciufo.
Engineers’ Guide to
VME, VPX & VXS 2013
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2 Engineers’ Guide to VME, VPX & VXS 2013