Versa Module Eurocard bus (VME). A 32-bit bus developed by Motorola, Signetics, Mostek, and Thompson CSF. It is widely used in industrial, commercial, and military applications with more than 300 manufacturers of VMEbus products worldwide. It is defined by the IEEE standard 1014-1987. VME64 is an expanded version that provides 64-bit data transfer and addressing.
What is a Critical System?
VITA defines a critical system as:
"A life-critical system or safety-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in:
Death or serious injury to people, or
Loss or severe damage to equipment, or
Environmental harm
Risks of this sort are usually managed with the methods and tools of safety engineering. A life-critical system is designed to lose less than one life per billion hours of operation. Typical design methods include probabilistic risk assessment, a method that combines failure modes and effects analysis with fault tree analysis.
"The definition is further restricted to high-performance distributed computing systems, sensor-based and requiring a network fabric that use non-Personal Computer systems.
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