Justin Moll —

VPX and VXS mean higher power levels, but they also mean hotter enclosures. However, conduction and liquid cooling methods are helping designers face the challenge, but both methods have their trade-offs.

John Lin —

Field commanders might feel a moral dilemma when faced with whether to risk the life of a healthy soldier in order to rescue an injured one. However, a new Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot (BEAR) is gearing up to prevent these casualties by rescuing injured soldiers from dangerous battlefield venues.

Earle Foster and Wallace Krebs —

The addition of general purpose I/O to both VME and PMC system buses has historically had its challenges: limitations in COTS I/O module diversity and insufficient slots for I/O. However, USB and Ethernet I/O options are effectively eliminating these hassles.

Thomas Roberts —

A new generation of real-time, ultra-compact, rugged, and powerful computers is starting to appear on the critical systems horizon, ideal for transforming unrelenting sensor data streams into information that is usable at data transmission bandwidths.

DRS Signal Solutions, Inc. and VMETRO, Inc. —

A look at combining the DRS SI-9146 Dual Tuner and the VMETRO Phoenix VPF1 VXS DSP engine illustrates a low-risk SIGINT and EW development approach.

Niranjan Nandakumar —

Modifications required in IT Security Architecture through the introduction of Mobility

Chris A. Ciufo —

While the VSO is working on real-world real estate problems, STI Electronics in Alabama has flown out-of-this-world solutions.

Ray Alderman —

Ray describes the trends and bends of the military, industrial, and telecom industries' board markets.

John Rynearson —

John provides a status update on the latest VITA standards.

Hermann Strass —

Hermann explores various VMEbus equipment developments making headway – and headlines – in today's market, along with recent events held in Europe.

Terri Thorson —

Editor Terri Thorson provides an overview of VITA's “2008 State of the VME Technology Industry” whitepaper, which delves into topics including technology, mergers and acquisitions, forecasting, risk management trends, and market fragmentation.

Nigel Forrester and Paul Virgo —

MicroTCA has served modern telecom apps well, and now the form factor is entering newer territory – the defense domain – and finding success therein.

Steve Romm —

Integrating COTS electronics into mission-critical systems can prove quite a challenge, but remedies are available to help solve the issues: SoC technology, the ability to design in maintainability and reliability from the start, and advances in semiconductor fabrication and PCB manufacturing.

Robert Normoyle —

SDR receiver manufacturers' custom and proprietary digitized data formats can make interoperability quite a challenge. However, now the VITA 49 Radio Transport (VRT) standard is aiming to solve the problem.

Dave Barker —

FPGAs are popular in today's military embedded systems, but I/O can become a problem with its tight coupling to the FPGA and resulting limited design reusability. This also limits the availability of COTS FPGA boards because it can be difficult to design an FPGA with the right I/O for a wide customer base. The new VITA 57 FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) standard is stepping in, however, to help engineers face these challenges.

Lori Bechtold —

The new VITA 51 open standard is adding practical and quantitative reliability prediction recommendations to the military's venerable MIL-HDBK-217.

David Compston —

VXS and VPX are providing an alternative path for VME-based embedded subsystems users, providing higher performance via switched serial fabrics. However, both VXS and VPX have their own pros and cons.

Paul R. Mesibov —

In the race between conventional backplane performance and VXS gigabit serial links, VXS wins by several orders of magnitude.

Acromag, Inc. —

FPGAs Replace Legacy VME

United Electronic Industries —

A modern alternative to VME I/O systems - UEI can solve availability problems

Rodger H. Hosking —

This handbook reviews the development of gigabit switched serial fabrics to enhance the VMEbus and PMC mezzanines; the role of FPGAs to implement this technology; and finally, how some of the latest VXS and XMC products can be used in high-speed data acquisition, recording and software radio systems.

Ray Alderman —

This whitepaper provides the reader with a strategic update on the state of the VME Technology industry, in particular, and a view of the board industry in general, from the perspective of Ray Alderman, the executive director of VITA. VITA is the trade association dedicated to fostering American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited, open system architectures in critical embedded system applications. The whitepaper reviews application markets, technology, mergers and acquisitions, forecasts and legal issues impacting VITA and its members in 2008.

Joseph M Jacob and Manuel Uhm —

There are numerous advantages of using CORBA with FPGA-based systems. CORBA support for partial reconfigurability, in particular, speeds development of embedded systems and promotes code reuse across multiple generations of products, to increase portability of applications.

Andrew Reddig —

In the choice of PMC/XMC or VXS, VITA's VXS is beating out the competition by providing more board and front-panel space, higher densities, improved analog performance, and more IP and I/O choices than XMCs or PMCs.

Robert Nokes —

Trade-offs must inevitably be made in SDR system design, and foreknowledge of their effects at the system level is critical when choosing SDR building blocks. To achieve the highest functionality possible, considerations such as converter components, form factor, and FPGA versus ASIC onboard processing power must be weighed carefully.