Editor’s note: I’m often asked if telecom and communications are key markets for VME and other open standards.
They are. This question is usually posed by someone with a “hidden agenda” hoping to cast aspersions on vendors and supporters of telecom markets. I’ve seen ample evidence that portions of these markets remain a robust place for mission-critical equipment – notably at the edge of the cloud in special-purpose systems such as packet shapers, voice-to-text-to-voice systems, and other specialty applications. And no company has been more involved with these markets than Intel.
To address those naysayers, I present this letter from Intel showing the company’s strong commitment to these applications, and to telecom in general. Intel prepared this statement exclusively for our readers at my request. – Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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