What you’ll learn:
- What is VITA 100?
- Why VITA 100 is important.
VITA started as the VMEbus International Trade Association back in the 1980s to champion standards and system architectures for the military and avionic arenas. One can still buy VMEbus systems, but these days OpenVPX is the name of the game, supporting systems based on Ethernet standards among others.
I recently attended VITA’s Embedded Tech Trends, a media-only event that was the public kickoff for the VITA 100 series of standards—designed to incorporate the latest Ethernet standards running at 400G now pushing toward 1.6T—as well as other related standards (Fig. 1). The video above is a presentation by Steven Devore, Product Architect at Leonardo DRS. Leonardo DRS has provided defense technologies for over 50 years to customers that include the U.S. Department of Defense.
VITA 100 isn’t a standard in and of itself. It will be a collection of VITA standards that define the boards, interfaces, and system architectures. These get down to the layout of boards, connectors, and even thermal management.
Two of the initial standards are VITA 100.0 and 100.1. These resemble the initial VPX standards of VITA 65.0 and VITA 46 for VITA 100.0, and VITA 56.1 profile tables for VITA 100.1. The number of standards is extensive, covering everything from header connectors, backplane connectors to coax and fiber connections, etc.
Why is VITA 100 Important?
Standards are critical to interoperability, and VITA standards are designed to last a long time. We’re talking multiple decades, not the years that others mean when they talk about longevity. Many (most?) of the applications are safety-critical as well.
The Open Group and the SOSA Consortium have built the SOSA standard for military applications around open standards like OpenVPX. VITA 100 will be the logical follow-through for future versions of SOSA and other standards.
VITA standards with similar functionality are already grouped together. For example, VITA 67.0, 67.1, 67.2, and 67.3 address coax interconnects on the backplane. All of these standards are necessary so that boards from one vendor will plug into a backplane from another and work with the rest of the boards from yet another vendor. The standards are very critical given the high speeds involved as well as the rugged conditions, not to mention the critical nature of most of the applications.
Possible New VITA Form Factor
We’ve hit the reticle limit in chip design, which means bigger monolithic chips aren’t economically feasible. This hasn’t stopped the growth in chip size, though. I recently attended the Chiplet Summit, which had presentations related to chiplet technology that will result in large, multi-die chip packages.
The 3U and 6U form factors are currently used by VITA for the majority of standards, but 3U has limitations due to the large chips (Fig. 2). Massive FPGAs, GPGPUs, and now artificial-intelligence (AI) accelerators are exceeding the space, power, and thermal limitations of the 3U form factor. Jumping to 6U is expensive and challenging for many applications, where size, weight, and power (SWaP) are key factors.
The suggested 4U form factor improves space by more than 60% over 3U. Although no specs exist yet, power and thermal limitations are increased, too. Any new VITA 100 standards are likely to include a 4U component.
We’re just at the start of VITA 100. Existing VITA standards will continue to play a part in many future system designs, but those pushing the envelope are likely to require the new standards.
