The VPX standard allows North Atlantic Industries and others to meet the increasing embedded computing bandwidth requirements of critical applications that need to collect, analyze and display large amounts of data while balancing the environmental considerations of size, weight and power (SWaP).
VPX standards retain VME’s compact 3U & 6U formats but establish a new direction for ruggedized embedded computing solutions by expanding the possible bandwidth of traditional VMEbus solutions. It expands the possible bandwidth, compared to the traditional VME system, by replacing the parallel bus with high speed, highly reliable serial buses and merging the latest in connector and packaging technology with the latest in bus and serial switch fabric technology.
Designed to work with any high-speed serial bus including, PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet and others, these serial buses offer higher data rates while using a fraction of the routing resources.
VPX is the general term that references three ANSI / VITA Standards and their applicable sub-paragraphs, including:
North Atlantic Industries designs and manufactures a variety of high-density, low power 3U & 6U products that are designed to meet VPX (VITA 46) standards. Further, NAI’s VPX Power Supplies are designed to meet VITA 46.11 for System Management.
The ANSI / VITA 47 standard defines a set of rigorous environmental, design, construction and quality requirements for COTS hardware that is intended for use in harsh defense and aerospace environments.
The VITA 47 standard outlines requirements for the following factors:
The following NAI products are designed to comply with VITA 47. View NAI's Ruggedization Capabilities and Environmental Specifications design guidelines.
The high-density boards that drive high-speed I/O require more power, making advanced cooling methods essential for rugged VPX designs.
Within VITA 48, VPX REDI (Ruggedized Enhanced Design Implementation Mechanical Base Specification) defines general mechanical design requirements for forced-air cooling, conduction cooling, and liquid flow through and spray cooling applications.
The purpose of this standard is to define an overall approach to packaging modules to improve both their thermal and structural characteristics as well as incorporate provisions for 2 level maintenance. Simply put, it defines the mechanical interface between the chassis and modules.
North Atlantic Industries designs all metalwork for our VPX / OpenVPX products to be compatible with the VPX-REDI standard and all applicable sub-paragraphs of ANSI / VITA 48.0.
The VITA 62 standard leverages all the effort within the VITA 46, VITA 47 (environmentals), VITA 48 (VPX-REDI), and VITA 65 standards while creating a set of design guidelines by which manufacturers can build power products that support the needs of the critical-systems embedded community while ensuring they can be plugged into VITA 62-compatible backplanes.
This standard supports interoperability, configuration flexibility, advanced levels of reliability and sophisticated systems management. VITA 62 uses the standard VPX 3U/6U form factor and complies to the requirements defined in VITA 48.0.
Connector configuration, power supply input and output requirements, pin-outs and mechanical configurations are all detailed. VITA 62 has utility functionality that includes N+1 failover, VBAT and 50ms holdup. Further, the standard provides guidelines for adherence to MIL-STD-461F (electromagnetic interference), MIL-STD-704F (electrical standards and holdup time) and MIL-STD-810F (ruggedization).
All of NAI’s Rugged Power Supplies are designed to meet VITA 62 requirements.
OpenVPX (VITA 65) was designed as a system-level implementation within the VPX specification to ensure the interoperability of products used in developing systems and subsystems.
By considering a system-level view of performance and interoperability, OpenVPX allows for the design and implementation of high-speed, high-power switched fabric-based systems while reducing the need for custom development of backplanes and chassis for every application. As a result, it also reduces development time and risk for the system integrators who use VPX boards in their systems.
OpenVPX methodically defines a system of profiles for slots, modules, backplanes and chassis that fully explain the interactions between the backplane and modules and promotes interoperability.
A slot profile: a physical mapping of ports onto a given slot’s backplane connectors.
A module profile: a physical mapping of ports onto a given Module’s backplane, connectors and protocol mappings. It contains information on the type and size of plug-in modules, the pipes available and the protocol associated with those pipes.
A backplane profile: describes the number and type of slots that are implemented, the standards supported, and the topology used for connecting the boards (centralized and distributed switching, and host/slave). It describes the channels and buses that interconnect slots and other physical entities in a backplane.
A chassis profile: a physical definition of a development chassis implementation that includes chassis type, slot count, primary power input, module cooling type, backplane profile, and supplied backplane power.
All NAI OpenVPX Boards are designed to meet the requirements of VITA 65.
All NAI Rugged VPX Power Supplies are designed as an off-the-shelf solution for VITA 46.0 and VITA 65 systems. They are compatible with VPX specifications; support all VITA standard I/O, signals, and features; and conforms to the VITA 62 mechanical and electrical requirements for modular power supplies.
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