This week's Bus&Board show in Long Beach, Calif., kicked off a celebration of VME's 25-year run. It has been the longest-lasting bus standard, and it continues to evolve and grow with new high-speed serial fabric standards like VITA 41 (VXS) and VITA 46.
VME retains the features that have made it great, including a rugged design with more expensive but more reliable connectors. These features have made the standard ideal for rugged applications like military and avionics.
At the Bus&Board conference, exhibits showcased a range of VME technologies. The show also featured AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA, and CompactPCI.
Bittware now supports VXS. Its T2V6 features eight 600-MHz ADSP-TS201 TigerSHARC DSPs and 512 Mbytes of RAM (see the figure). The board targets applications like radar, sonar, communications, and imaging.
The T2V6 also incorporates a pair of Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs (XC2VP20/30) to handle external interfaces and provide coprocessing support. The FPGAs use the ATLANTiS architecture, featuring a bandwidth of 8 Gbytes/s via 16 ports that operate up to 500 Mbytes/s. A Tundra Tsi148 PCI-X-VME bridge delivers 2eSST support.
SBE showed off its PyX CompactPCI iSCSI-and SAS blade. The board has a Power-PC with 1 Gbyte of RAM, two PCI Telecom Mezzanine Card (PTMC) sites, a dual Gigabit Ethernet PICMG 2.16 backplane, and a front-panel Gigabit Ethernet interface. It supports load balancing and has multipath capabilities. The main board supports eight SAS drives. Two SAS daughter-boards provide access to eight more SAS drives.
Bittware
www.bittware.com
SBE Inc.
www.sbei.com
VITA Bus and Board
www.vita.com