Government programs are putting the squeeze on prime contractors to develop more war fighting capability faster. Consequently, the primes are calling for open standards and the end of proprietary architectures to help them meet these challenging requirements within shorter and shorter timeframes.

When VXS, a proposal for standardizing gigabit serial switched fabrics shook the embedded community in 2002 as part of the VMEbus renaissance, XMC, a natural extension of that technology to PMC modules was inevitable. VXS is the popular name for a switched serial backplane fabric implementation for VMEbus. The VXS specification is fabric-transparent, in that there are subspecifications, one for each of fabrics: Infiniband, Serial RapidIO, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express.

OpenVPX expands on the VPX[] Base and Dot Specifications and provides a System Specification to address interoperability issues between VPX modules and Chassis. OpenVPX is an extensible specification that addresses the current and future needs for computing in harsh environments.

Find out the company’s perspective on OpenVPX.

A look at combining the DRS SI-9146 Dual Tuner and the VMETRO Phoenix VPF1 VXS DSP engine illustrates a low-risk SIGINT and EW development approach.