VITA to explore feasibility of system interconnects

SAN JOSE: The VITA Standards Organisation, a major standards group for military and aerospace markets, has decided to explore the feasibility of deploying, in 2012, products with system interconnects and optical backplanes.

In a statement, the VITA Standards Organisation – a trade and standards group for the VMEbus widely used in mission-critical embedded systems – said the group’s mission is to define the state-of-the-art in optical technologies in order to find out where the gaps are and to work with vendors of silicon and systems on how to partner to address those gaps so that the VITA can deploy, in 2012, systems running up in the terabits.

Ray Alderman, executive director of VITA Standards Organisation VITA said in the statement that a lot of people are working on “pieces of this problem,” but the group still has to overcome some obstacles.

In military and aerospace markets, according to Ray Alderman, plug-and-play subsystems – called line-replacement units (LRUs) – are becoming increasingly popular and will require high-bandwidth interconnects.

Major companies in the areas of computers and communications are also seeking a transition from copper to optical technologies, but their shift could be a decade away, Alderman said.

The Optical Internetworking Forum, a group of vendors of computers and communications chip and systems, conducted a workshop recently gather support for a draft standard which could drive copper and optical connections to 25G.