Celebrating 25 Years Of VME And More

Jan. 19, 2006

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 (V

William G. Wong

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

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.