Elma Bustronic Announces VITA 31.1 Gigabit Ethernet Backplanes

FREMONT, California, Mar 20, 2007 - Elma Bustronic Corporation, an industry leading designer and manufacturer of high performance backplanes has developed a new 5-slot VPX backplane.

The 5-slot VPX features a mesh topology with a theoretical slot-to-slot bandwidth of over 5,000 Mbytes/sec. The backplane was designed with a 20-layer controlled-impedance stripline design. To ensure optimal performance, signal integrity analysis was performed on the backplane. Elma Bustronic fabricated the backplane with the higher grade material commercial FR408. This allows excellent performance even at high signal frequencies.

Elma Bustronic has been a leader in VPX technology. The company developed the industry’s first VPX backplane and proposed the VME pinout for the VITA 46 committee. The VPX backplane technology is expected to be used in various applications, particularly Military/Aerospace where the rugged form-factor, VME compatibility, and high-performance are key requirements.

While maintaining backward compatibility with legacy VME technology via preservation of the VMEbus 6U mechanical form factor and through-mapping of the current VMEbus signals to the VITA 46 connectors, the VITA 46 technology brings the following features to reality while maintaining ability to inter-operate with existing VME technology boards:

Vastly increased high-speed serial I/Osupport for such needs as digital video, mass storage interconnects (e.g. SATA) and FPGA interconnects (e.g. RocketIO).
Support for high-speed switched serial fabrics with performance up to 10 Gbps.
Support for cost-reducing two-level maintenance by providing an Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) protection mechanism and board covers.
Support of distributed switching that eliminates the need for dedicated switch card slots.
Support for VITA 42 mezzanine sites with high speed I/O.