By John Keller

It’s been a long time in coming, but the market for VPX-based embedded computing is ready to take off. Now that interoperability standards are settling down, the need for small, fast computer boards is higher than ever before, and powerful new multicore microprocessors are ready to hit the market.

VPX single-board computers use a high-speed, switched-fabric architecture for communications among computer boards in a chassis, rather than a parallel backplane databus, which enables systems designers using VPX to employ fast networking like Gigabit Ethernet, RapidIO, or other high-speed serial interconnects for data throughput.

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That is music to the ears of engineers who are looking at new generations of multicore processors, need to stuff high performance in a small space, or face daunting signal processing demands from radar, forward-looking infrared, or other advanced sensors.

“What we like about VPX is it gives you a rich serial fabric environment for I/O at exactly the right time–when multicore processor technology is really on a march,” explains Bill Kehret, president and chief executive officer of Themis Computer in Fremont, Calif.

“VPX has lovely I/O bandwidth that we could only dream about in the VME world,” Kehret says. “This is a state-of-the-art thing. In the next 18 months, we will see processor offerings from AMD and Intel of six to eight cores; those will be power-hungry chips.”

One standout feature of VPX is its ability to bring powerful computing performance to a 3U card–a feat that VME never was able to perform well. Big performance in a small space, with several kinds of circuit card cooling available, makes VPX attractive for size, weight, and power (SWaP)-constrained applications like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are incorporating ever-more-sophisticated sensor payloads.

“In VPX our customers see a real benefit in performance, SWaP, and everything good about VPX,” says Jeff Porter, senior engineer with Extreme Engineering Solutions Inc. in Middleton, Wis. “It has high-speed serial interconnects, and a platform to get a lot of power and performance out of a small space. Any technology looking at getting more out of less space is a candidate for 3U VPX.”

The choice of VPX was not always straightforward, however, despite the technology’s benefits. Until this past fall, systems integrators were concerned about the lack of interoperability standards in the VPX specification. Embedded computer manufacturers and systems integrators put their heads together in the OpenVPX group, and hammered out standards for interoperability acceptable to virtually everyone involved.

The OpenVPX group has handed its VPX interoperability guildelines off to the VITA open standards group in Scottsdale, Ariz., which should ratify its interoperability guidelines for VPX into a new industry standard called VITA 65.

“In its first few years, VPX was all over the map in terms of interoperability,” explains Rodger Hosking, vice president at signal processing specialist Pentek Inc. in Upper Saddle River, N.J. “It’s not perfect yet, but our feeling is it will be adopted and released, and will be something that people can design to.”

Work done in the OpenVPX group was key to nailing down crucial interoperability standards, Hosking says. “The right people were there and they were extremely motivated to get this thing passed,” he explains. “There is business there, and there is money to be made.”

With the VITA 65 standards in place, systems integrators “don’t have to deal with the headaches of designing from scratch when there is a new program,” explains Porter.

New programs vs. system upgrades can be a tricky question for engineers looking for the latest embedded computing technologies. Industry consensus holds that VPX is best for new programs, rather than systems upgrades, which might benefit from the latest developments in legacy technologies, such as VME and CompactPCI.

With all the pieces falling into place, embedded systems suppliers are ready for serious market growth in VPX. “We see it as a growth market, especially on new programs looking for new opportunities and not tied to a specific backplane,” says Steven Edwards, chief technical officer for embedded computing at Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing in Leesburg, Va.