SpaceVPX standard ratified by VITA Standards Organization
NewsApril 14, 2015
FOUNTAIN HILLS, Ariz. Officials at VITA, the trade association, behind the VPX and VME standards, announced that the VITA 78 “SpaceVPX Systems” achieved ANSI recognition as ANSI/VITA 78.00-2015, which completes the VITA and ANSI processes for reaching full recognition under the guidance of the VITA Standards Organization (VSO).
ANSI/VITA 78, also known as the Next Generation Space Interconnect Standard (NGSIS), defines an open standard for creating high performance fault tolerant interoperable backplanes and modules for assembling electronic systems for spacecraft and other high availability applications. These systems will support a variety of use cases and potential markets across the aerospace and terrestrial communities. This standard uses the OpenVPX standards family and the commercial infrastructure that supports these standards.
For more on SpaceVPX, read "SpaceVPX extends the embedded computing standard to meet the special demands of space."
The goal of SpaceVPX Systems is to achieve an acceptable level of fault tolerance while maintaining reasonable compatibility with OpenVPX components, including connector pin assignments. For the purposes of fault tolerance, a module is considered the minimum redundancy element.
For high reliability applications, the major fault tolerance requirements are:
· Dual-redundant power distribution (bussed) where each distribution is supplied from an independent power source.
· Dual-redundant utility plane signal distribution (point-to-point cross-strapped) where each distribution is supplied from an independent system controller to a module that selects between the A and B system controllers for distribution to each of the slots controlled by the module.
· Card-level serial management
· Card-level reset control
· Card-level power control
· Matched length, low-skew differential timing/synchronization/clocks
· Fault tolerant Power Supply Select (bussed)
· Fault tolerant System Controller Signal selection (bussed)
· Dual-redundant data planes (point-to-point cross-strapped)
· Dual-Redundant control planes (point-to-point cross-strapped)
· Each module is a managed field replaceable unit as defined by VITA 46.11
Copies of the specification may be purchased at the VITA Online Shop, http://shop.vita.com/.
