VPX

VPX was originally defined by American Logic Machines Inc (ALM) as a scalable backplane technology. The VPX3264, VPX3232 bridge chips and the scalable backplane were based on VPX. VPX technology was presented at bus&board (VITA) in 2004. ALM continues to build custom chipsets for clients including VME-to-PCIX, VME-to-Futurebus+ and other custom scalable backplane technologies. VPX, formerly known as VITA 46, is an ANSI standard (ANSI/VITA 46.0-2007) that provides VMEbus-based systems with support for switched fabrics over a new high speed connector. Defined by the VITA (VME International Trade Association) working group (composed of companies such as Boeing, Curtiss-Wright, Elma Electronic, Extreme Engineering (X-ES), GE Intelligent Platforms, Kontron, Mercury Computer Systems, Pentek, Cornet Technology, Inc., and Northrop Grumman), it 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 Eurocard form factors, supporting existing PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) and XMC mezzanines (PMC with high-speed serial fabric interconnect), and maintaining the maximum possible compatibility with VMEbus.

New generations of embedded systems based on the VPX standard reflect the growing significance of high speed serial switched fabric interconnects such as PCI Express, RapidIO, Infiniband and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. These technologies are replacing traditional parallel communications bus architectures for local communications, because they offer significantly greater capability. Switched fabrics technology supports the implementation of multiprocessing systems that require the fastest possible communications between multiple processors (e.g., digital signal processing applications). VPX gives the large existing base of VMEbus users access to these switched fabrics.

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