Bus & Board 2007: New name, new products introduced

This is the last year for the Bus & Board show under that name, but not the last show from VITA, the organization celebrating the VMEbus 25th anniversary. The show, held in Long Beach, CA, in January, was the platform for a number of new product introductions and an announced name change for next year. The Critical Embedded Systems show will combine Bus and Board with two other VITA-sponsored events: Military Embedded Electronics and Computing Conference and CoolCON, which focuses on liquid cooling of electronics.

A VITA spokesman said the name change more accurately reflects the mission of VMEbus and all that has come to be associated with it. Critical embedded systems are defined as life-critical or safety-critical systems whose failure or malfunction may result in death or serious injury to people, loss or severe damage to equipment, or environmental harm. Not just military, they can be found in medical, aerospace, critical infrastructure and industrial applications.

New products announced at this year’s show included:

Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing announced the SDRxR, a new serial FPDP-based streaming data recorder. It’s for sensor-to-processor streaming data applications and consists of a single 3U rack-mounted chassis containing the controller, interface boards, and hard disk drives for two channels. It provides multi-channel recording of high volume and continuous data streams at rates up to 245 MB/s per channel for such applications as radar, sonar, FLIR, RF tuners, and MRI. Also new from Curtiss-Wright is a dual 4.25 Gbps channel Fibre Channel (FC) PMC card for high-bandwidth data communications and storage applications, an embedded system based on the new high-bandwidth VPX (VITA 46) open architecture bus standard, and a 6-slot VPX and VPX-REDI development chassis.

Carlo Gavazzi Computing Solutions showed the 5359 Series FabricPac SM CompactPCI 2.16 compliant switch fabric platform. This unit contains two redundant IPMI system management cards supporting single or dual system manager operation. Features include dual ac or dc input, 600 or 400 W PICMG 2.11 power supplies, and cooling airflow of 400 LFM per slot to all node, switch, and power supply slots. The unit contains a PICMG 2.16 switch fabric backplane that delivers a maximum data throughput of more than 40 Gb/s.

Vmetro showed the Vortex M6000 VME/VXS recorder. With dual 4 Gb/s or quad 2Gb/s Fibre Channel ports, it can reach 720 MB/s recording performance in a single 6U VXS (VITA-41) slot. Suggested applications include industrial inspection systems; medical scanners; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance devices. Also new from Vmetro is the Virtex-5 LX110 FPGA-based PMC module with integrated dual analog input channels, and the Vmdrive solid state drive for 6U VME and CompactPCI systems for military and aerospace applications. The latter provides 80 GB of solid-state storage in conduction-cooled or commercial air-cooled environments, and can transfer data at up to 70 MB/s.

Although much attention was given at the show to VPX and VXS, older busses remain not only viable but thriving. An example is the EPIC/PM from Kontron . It’s based on the Pentium M 745 processor and provides complete PC/104-Plus functionality with both PCI and VME expansion. It’s available with an Intel Pentium M 745 processor with 1.8 GHz and 2 MB L2 cache or for low cost or fanless operation, ULV Celeron M 373 with 1 GHz (512 KB L2) or Intel processor Celeron 800 MHz (0KB L2) versions.

Emerson Network Power (formerly Artesyn Communication Products ) just released its new SpiderWareM3 platform management system for MicroTCA systems. It aids in monitoring, managing, and maintaining multiple AdvancedMC blades in multiple MicroTCA chassis, and can be integrated with existing HA middleware software. It reportedly provides a rapid development environment that simplifies integration and testing, and a flexible management framework that simplifies everyday configuration and maintenance for field telecom systems.

— Peter Cleaveland , contributing editor, Control Engineering

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