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by jason mcdonald, senior editor | read other blog posts

Does the military lead, or follow, commercial embedded systems? It can be hard to tell - especially in these days when network centric warfare can just as easily describe the 21st century battlefield as it does the struggle to hack into, and prevent hacking, of our international cell phone networks. VITA and its members have been working hard to bring VME into the 21st century, so this month we take a look at VPX / VITA 46 and how this standard is emerging in the marketplace.

contents of this post:

1. VPX / VITA 46 - What is it?
2. OpenVPX - Broadening VPX with an Open Organization
3. Military Embedded Systems and VPX: a Case Study
4. feedback - read it
5. feedback - give it

VPX / VITA 46 - What is it?

The basic place to learn about VPX is, of course, VITA ( http://www.vita.com/vpx.html ). Their VPX page tell us that "VPX is a broadly defined technology utilizing the latest in a variety of switch fabric technologies in 3U and 6U format blades. OpenVPX is the architecture framework that defines system level VPX interoperability for multi-vendor, multi-module, integrated system environments."

Another quick place to look is Wikipedia's page, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPX . Wikipedia points out the military connection - The Standard "has been designed specifically with defense applications in mind, with an enhanced module standard that enables applications and platforms with superior performance. VPX retains VME’s existing 6U and 3U form factors, supporting existing PCI Mezzanine Card and XMC mezzanines (PMC with high-speed serial fabric interconnect), and maintaining the maximum possible compatibility with VMEbus."

Finally vendor GE Fanuc publishes a good manual on the technology, which you can get here . That guide points out the the strategy of VPX is intertwined with the emergence of high speed serial networks.

OpenVPX - Broadening VPX with an Open Organization

OpenVPX attempts to catalyze the growth of VPX beyond the narrow community by embracing the standards organizations, military embedded vendors, and other involved in the creation of next-generation military embedded systems. Its headquarters, as it were, is at the Mercury Computer Website, or http://www.mc.com/OpenVPX/ . The goal is to promote interoperability among vendors, both VPX and COTS military, and thereby promote a healthy ecosystem.

An email reflector exists, if you are interested in following this new technology. Plus Mercury has lead the industry with its OpenVPX Reference Design Kits provides an engineering blueprint for developing OpenVPX-compliant 6U and 3U payload and switch modules. The OpenVPX V1.0 System Specification is the first system VPX specification dedicated to interoperability of multi-vendor system and sub-system building blocks. You can find information on those, here .

If you are interested in the military embedded systems area, or perhaps the convergence of military and civilian technologies in terms of high speed serial fabrics, don't miss the Webinar series at Mercury on many of these topics.

Military Embedded Systems and VPX: a Case Study

One vendor leading the way towards VPX has been Extreme Engineering Solutions, Inc. (X-ES). The company designs and builds chassis, single-board computers, I/O, power, backplane, and system-level products within the embedded computer industry.The company has released some of the better news in the VPX and military embedded systems area. For example:

• XCalibur1541: A 6U VPX SBC Featuring Freescale MPC 8572E Processor - This is a MPC8572E based 6U VPX board that ranges from commercial to full blown military (conduction- cooled) applications. With Freescale Semiconductor’s dual-core MPC8572E PowerQUICC™ III processor, XCalibur1541 delivers enhanced performance and efficiency for today’s commercial, industrial and military embedded computing applications. XCalibur1541 is a powerful solution structured for…

• Seven Embedded Products Based on the Latest Intel® Core™i7 Processor - seven embedded computing products based on the new Intel Core i7 processor. X-ES is committed to supporting the Intel Core i7 embedded processor across Extreme Engineering’s entire line of form factors with support for the Intel Core i7- 610E, i7-620LE, and i7-620UE processors. All products from X-ES based on the Intel Core i7 embedded processor are available in commercial, air-cooled to rugged, conduction-cooled versions suitable for a wide variety of commercial, industrial and military applications….

You can follow all the VPX news via eg3.com's e-clips service, here .

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Express Logic develops, markets and supports the ThreadX® real-time operating system (RTOS), NetX™ TCP/IP networking stack, USBX™ USB stack, and FileX® embedded file system, and PrismX™ GUI toolkit for embedded applications. ThreadX is a royalty-free, full source code, small-footprint, low-overhead RTOS that is extremely easy to learn and use. ThreadX is one of the most widely deployed RTOS products in the world, with over 800 million products based on ThreadX.