BUSTRONIC RELEASES VXS SWITCHED SERIAL BACKPLANES

FREMONT, California, March 17, 2004 - Bustronic Corporation, an industry leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance backplanes, has announced it has unleashed a new line of VXS Switched Serial Backplanes compliant to the new VITA 41.0 specification. The 12-slot VXS backplane features a Dual Star switched fabric topology and a special high-grade material to maximize performance.

The VXS Switched Serial standard is new VITA initiative to advance VME technology. Fully backwards-compatible to VME/VME64x, VXS utilizes a new 6.4 Gbps high-speed connector across the P0 section of a VME64x backplane. The new connector allows the use of switched fabric signals for higher bandwidth and reliability. The VITA 41 specification for VXS includes VITA 41.1 for Infiniband and VITA 41.2 for RapidIO traffic. (Other fabric technologies may be implemented later.) Designers will have the flexibility of plugging in standard VME64x cards for parallel bus only, integrate new payload and switch cards for parallel bus and switch fabric transport or switch fabric transport only.

Bustronic's 12-slot VXS backplane features two fabric (hub) slots and ten payload slots. To improve the signal integrity of the backplane, Nelco-4000 13SI material was used for the PCB instead of standard FR-4. The material has a low dielectric constant and low loss tangent values at high frequencies, resulting in much higher performance. The routing was achieved in an 18-layer controlled-impedance stripline design. Bustronic's VXS backplanes are compliant to the VITA 38 specification for System Management. The 7U height of the backplane allows room for plenty of power taps for 3.3V, 5V, +/- 12V, and GND.

Other standard VXS configurations will be developed in the coming months, and customized versions are available.