OpenVPX — From Concept to Specification

The OpenVPX Industry Working Group, a 28-company team founded by Mercury Computer Systems, collaborated with a common goal and accelerated the completion of a system architecture specification for open system COTS suppliers and integrators to specify, design, and build multi-vendor interoperable solutions.

Timeline:

• January 2009 — OpenVPX Specification effort by Mercury Computer Systems begins, based on VPX embedded community’s need to accelerate multi-vendor interoperable solutions.
  
• March 2009 — First open membership face-to-face meeting and call for membership.Spring/Summer 2009 — Ongoing meetings, conference calls and discussions.
• October 2009 — OpenVPX specification V1.0 completed and transition to VITA 65 working group.
• January 2010 — VITA 65 Working group completed comment resolution, balloting and ratification of the specification.
• June 2010 — ANSI VITA 65-2010 ratification of the OpenVPX System Architecture Specification.

Countless hours were spent with embedded community technical and business leaders (suppliers and integrators) to come up with a system-level architecture specification, dedicated to creating well-defined interoperability points for multi-vendor, 3U and 6U VPX integrated solutions. The inter-company marathon was a testament to what can be done when experts are dedicated to solving a significant industry issue for the good of the ultimate primary customer — the warfighters.

So What?

If the following is important to your company or your customer, then OpenVPX should be important to you.

• Reduce TCO in integrated systems life cycle;
• Use of common language for simplified RFP generation;
• Choice of ecosystems to lower costs, get best-of-breed capabilities;
  
• Technology refresh possibilities with reduced obsolescence hurdles;
• Highly interoperable, multi-vendor integrated solutions development;
• Open standards, performance migration, and proliferation;
• Reduced risk to deployment for QRC programs;
• 1 GiGE, 10 GiGE, sRIO, PCIe gen 2.0 fabrics;
• Optimized SWaP smart processing via open architectures.
  
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