Vmetro unveils VPX system

HOUSTON, 11 July 2008. Vmetro has introduced a five-slot VPX/VXS portable tower enclosure and backplane to accelerate and simplify VPX system integration and development.

A challenge of developing with VPX is there isn't a "standard" VPX backplane, which can result in delays on many VPX programs while custom backplanes are developed, says a company representative.

The VMETRO VPX/VXS portable tower's design enables exploitation of the backplane bandwidth of the company's FPE650 quad-FPGA and HPE640 hybrid-PowerPC/FPGA VPX boards, while enabling developers to integrate Vmetro's existing VXS boards into embedded real-time DSP systems.

The backplane is designed specifically to support the high-speed and high-bandwidth I/O and backplane interconnectivity of the Vmetro FPE650 and HPE640 VPX boards.

The VPX/VXS backplane is equipped with 3 VPX slots and 2 VXS slots (1 payload and 1 switch). To support VPX/REDI boards, the VPX slots in are on a 1-inch pitch.

The chassis, model VPX-ENC-0102, can enclose a signal processing system controlled by a PowerPC processor running VxWorks or Linux and up to 14 Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs and 6 high-speed analog input FMC (VITA 57) modules, according to Vmetro personnel.