After one of the most bitter battles in the history of Vita, the Open VPX standard has at last been ratified by the Vita Standards Organisation (VSO)’s Vita 65 working group.
The working group will submit the specification to a larger body of interested parties for balloting as part of the process to gain Ansi ratification.
This process is expected to take two to three months, after which time the specification will be available to designers in the industry.
The working group received the original body of work from the Open VPX industry working group in October 2009. Since then, the group has been resolving the last outstanding comments received during the balloting process.
At the January VSO meeting, the required number of approvals was achieved, officially recognising the specification as ratified by the VSO.
As an illustration of how far Vita has come in this, Curtiss-Wright’s Pete Jha was chair of the working group and Mercury’s Greg Rocco was lead editor of the group. A year ago, these two companies were in open hostility to each other over how work on Open VPX should continue.
“This is a major step forward in the process of reaching our final goal,” said Hybricon’s Neil Peterson, chairman of the VPX Marketing Alliance. “VSO ratification means that we now have a solid specification that can enable designs of compliant products to move forward and we look to see ongoing product releases of Open VPX compliant products from our member companies.”
VPX is a broadly defined technology using the latest in various switch fabric technologies in 3U and 6U format modules. Open VPX is the architecture framework that defines system-level VPX interoperability for multivendor, multimodule, integrated system environments.
The Open VPX framework delineates clear interoperability points necessary for integrating module to module, module to backplane, and chassis. Open VPX recommends but does not specify development systems to assist in VPX system evaluation, prototyping and development.
The plan is for Open VPX to evolve and incorporate new fabric, connector and system technologies as new standards are defined.
There are now 23 members of the VPX Marketing Alliance, which was set up late last year (MTE, December 2009).