RTC Magazine

Embedded COTS Vendors Issue Joint Statement on Open Standards Model and VSO

Several leading COTS embedded board, subsystem and backplane and enclosure vendors, including Curtiss-Wright Controls, Elma Electronic, Carlo Gavazzi and X-ES Inc. have issued a joint statement of support for the proven open standard approach to the development of bus and board system architectures. The companies wish to reiterate and reinforce the importance of maintaining the integrity and openness of the VITA Standards Organization (VSO), an arm of the trade association of which each of the companies is a member.

The companies jointly issued the following statement:

“The cooperative work of the members of the VITA Standards Organization (VSO) resulted in the creation and evolution of VME, for over 25 years the de facto board architecture of choice for the aerospace and defense market, and, more recently, VPX (VITA 46/48), a higher performance, more flexible enhancement to VME. The spirit of ‘coopetition’ and openness that brought VSO’s members, including competing vendors and users, together for the common good of the industry reflects and embodies the standards body’s basic principles that ensure fairness, inclusion and consensus for all participants. These principles have fostered and guided the success of VITA since its inception in 1984, then under the stewardship of VITA’s founding director Lyman C. Hevle, and the VSO, one of the electronics industry’s most respected standards body, since its formation in 1993.

“We recognize the importance of defining an open specification for system-level VPX interoperability, but we also believe that this work is best done within the existing, proven model of the VSO Working Group system. The open forum provided by VITA is the right and best place for the industry to cooperatively develop the critical new VPX initiatives destined for use by important customers such as the U.S. military.

“We recommend the formation of a VSO Working Group on VPX interoperability for VITA 46 (VPX) to help resolve issues and speed the development of a common VPX backplane architecture while ensuring that no single company or selective group of companies is able to exert undo influence on the specification and unfairly benefit from the cooperative work of all the member companies who have contributed resources and efforts over many years to the standard’s development.”

The VSO’s fundamental principle, as stated on VITA’s Web site is: “Within the VSO no one individual holds the power to decide what technology may become a standard—that power belongs solely to the membership.” The joint statement above is made in the spirit of this principle.

BittWare Adopts VITA 57 FPGA Mezzanine Card Standard

BittWare has announced it has adopted the VITA 57 FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) standard on their new “S4” family of board-level signal processing solutions. FMC provides an industry standard for expanding processing or I/O via mezzanine cards that connect to FPGA(s) on the carrier card. Electrically, the FMC connector supports high-speed serial (SerDes) ports, LVDS, clocks and single ended signaling, providing a wide range of options and flexibility to the user. 

Similarly, the mechanical format of the FMC supports a variety of standard carrier board formats including AdvancedMC (AMC), VME, VXS and VPX, and can be air-cooled or conduction-cooled. 

The addition of an FMC site on BittWare’s S4 family of FPGA boards, based on Altera Corporation’s 40nm Stratix IV FPGAs, allows customers to support an extremely broad range of applications simply by adding specific I/O or processing via various FMCs. Coupled with BittWare’s ATLANTiS FrameWork (AFW) for FPGAs, the FMCs also facilitate design reuse of FPGA implementations that will decrease time-to-market, while also lowering costs across multiple programs. In addition to supporting VITA 57 on their S4 family of signal processing hardware, BittWare will also be releasing their own family of FMCs for I/O and processing expansion.

At the heart of the S4 family of signal processing hardware is an Altera Stratix IV GX FPGA, which provides unparalleled performance and flexibility. Each onboard FPGA supports 530K equivalent logic elements, 20.3 Mbits of RAM and 1,024 embedded multipliers. Onboard connections to the FPGA also provide up to 27 full-duplex, multi-gigabit transceivers—24 of which support data rate speeds of 8.5 Gbits/s. The FPGA supports a number of protocols, including PCI Express Gen1 and Gen2 and Serial RapidIO.