Standards

Mercury is a strong proponent of open industry standards that enable innovation and interoperability. Our support of important hardware and software standards promotes ease of application development, portability, scalability, and integration with hardware and software provided by a broad set of third-party companies.

VITA Standards

Mercury is a member of the board of directors of VITA, the governing body of the VMEbus International Trade Association. We contribute to the VITA working groups that are actively renewing the VMEbus architecture and ecosystem.

Mercury is currently involved in the following VITA standards efforts:

VITA 41 VME Switched Serial (VXS) (Mercury Sponsor)

The VXS standard serves as the latest in a 20-year series of evolutionary improvements for the VME architecture. VXS adds a high-speed serial switch fabric to the established VersaModule Eurocard (VME) form factor. This allows defense electronics applications to enjoy a quantum leap in fabric performance while maintaining backward compatibility with the tried and true VME64 architecture.

Learn more:
Technology Overview: VITA 41 (VXS)
PowerStream 6100: The Next Generation VME System

VITA 41.2 Serial RapidIO in VXS (Mercury Editor)

The VITA 41.2 extension adds industry-leading serial RapidIO® fabric as an option to the base VXS architecture.

VITA 17.2 Serial Front-Panel Data Port (FPDP) Extension (Mercury Sponsor)

Serial FPDP provides a high-speed, low-latency front-panel data link between adjacent boards in a VME system. VITA 17.2 provides for extensions to ANSI/VITA 17.1 to support 2.5, 3.125, and 4.25 Gbaud front-panel data links. VITA 17.2 maintains compatibility with the existing ANSI/VITA 17.1 while increasing the bandwidth of the link and providing for a 5-bit CRC for the header/trailer. Serial FPDP is protocol agnostic, supporting several existing interconnect standards including serial RapidIO and PCI Express™.

VITA 42 Fabric Mezzanine Card (XMC) (Mercury Sponsor)

The XMC standard adds a high-speed parallel or serial fabric interface to the popular PCI mezzanine card (PMC) form factor, which is ubiquitous in embedded computing. Originally called RMC, for RapidIO mezzanine card, XMC is also fabric agnostic and has evolved to support many fabrics including RapidIO, PCI Express, and others.

Learn more:
Technology Overview: VITA 42 (XMC)

VITA 42.1 Parallel RapidIO over XMC (Mercury Editor)

The VITA 42.1 extension adds industry-leading RapidIO fabric as an option to the base XMC standard.

VITA 46 Versa-Protocol on a MultiGigabit Connector (Mercury Editor)

The VITA 46 working group has set out to implement the VMEbus Versa-Protocol in 3U or 6U, 160-mm slot profiles. VITA 46 calls out high-density multi-gigabit connectors that provide an increased number of pins for high-speed fabric support and even greater flexibility in user I/O. Legacy VME boards can co-reside with VITA 46 cards in a chassis using a hybrid backplane – same protocol, different connectors. The smaller 3U form factor is attractive to space-constrained applications like mobile platforms. In addition to the dual-star backplane topology, VITA 46 has enough pins to define mesh clusters. In a mesh, every board is connected to every other board using a direct point-to-point connection. Mesh architectures eliminate the need for a central switch on a dedicated fabric card. This frees up board slots, which is advantageous for space-constrained applications. Meshes also provide enormous bisection bandwidth. VITA 46 is closely associated with VITA 48.

Learn more:
Technology Overview: VITA 46 (VPX)

VITA 48 Ruggedized Enhanced Design Implementation (REDI) (Mercury Sponsor)

VITA 48 defines a set of interoperability standards for enhanced ruggedization including plug-in units and sub-rack interfaces for air-cooling, conduction-cooling, liquid-flow-through, and spray cooling. The REDI standard promises to bring open standards to an area of mechanical ruggedization that has been largely based on proprietary designs. This will insure that an ecosystem develops for liquid and spray cooling techniques. Other enhancements include an increase in board-to-board spacing and PCB thickness, and a significantly increased power budget. These cooling and mechanical enhancements are becoming increasingly important as components use more power, run hotter, and require more complex routing and higher heat sinks. REDI also adds support for two-level maintenance (2LM), which simplifies field servicing. REDI is modular and can be applied to other form factors aside from VITA 46.

In parallel with the VITA 48 standards development activity, proof-of-concept designs have been underway since the end of 2004. These are non-operational concept designs, fabricated by Mercury personnel, which enable hands-on mechanical form and fit review for feedback into the standard ahead of its approval. In January 2005, the first air- and conduction-cooled proof-of-concept chassis and modules were introduced. In May 2005, a liquid-cooled, proof-of-concept three-slot card cage was introduced with representative liquid-cooled modules.

Learn more:
White Paper: A VITA Based Framework for Ruggedized COTS Electronics with Emphasis on Liquid Cooling – VITA 48 (REDI)

VITA 49 Digital Interface Standard (Mercury Sponsor)

The Digital IF standard creates a physical-layer agnostic protocol that allows passing IF data between system elements in a digital format.

In May 2005, Mercury and DRS Signal Solutions demonstrated digital IF data movement complying with the proposed VITA 49 standard. Simulating operation within a signal processing system, data was transferred from a DRS Signal Solutions digital tuner to an FPGA-based processing module from Mercury.

Following are some of the other important standards that Mercury supports. In many cases, we also play a leading role in defining and maintaining these standards.

• ATCA: A set of specifications that covers mechanical, shelf management, power distribution, data transport, thermal, regulatory guidelines, and data/power connections. Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA®) is the official PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG®) standard for open architecture for carrier-grade communications equipment.
• FPDP: The Front Panel Data Port (FPDP) standard sets signal characteristics for data input and output independent of backplane connector usage. Mercury's newer products support the Serial FPDP standard (VITA 17.1-2003) over fiber.
• InfiniBand®: An emerging channel-based, switch fabric architecture for communication between systems. InfiniBand provides a scalable performance range of 500 MB/s to 6 GB/s per link.
• RACEway: A high-performance switch fabric interconnect designed to transfer data between processor nodes in a deterministic, high-performance real-time system. RACEway transfers 32-bit data at up to 66 MHz and provides multiple paths for virtually unlimited simultaneous transfers within a system.
• PCI: Similar to VME in intent, the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) standard defines mechanical and electrical characteristics of boards for desktop and industrial applications.
• RapidIO: The next generation of switch fabric interconnect designed specifically for high-performance embedded systems. The RapidIO standard defines parallel and serial data connections ranging from 5 Gbits/s to 64 Gbits/s with increased reliability, scalability, and flexibility.
• VME64: A mechanical and electrical superset of the original IEEE 1014-1987 standard, VME64 defines electrical and mechanical characteristics of computer boards and is widely accepted in defense and laboratory markets.

• OCP-IP: The Open Core Protocol International Partnership is dedicated to developing a common standard for intellectual property (IP) core interfaces, or sockets, which facilitate plug-and-play system-on-chip (SoC) design. This non-profit corporation facilitates IP core reusability to reduce design time, risk, and manufacturing costs.

• DRI: The Data Reorganization Interface is an industry-standard software interface for performing data-parallel distribution and reorganization operations on N-dimensional data such as distributed matrix transpositions and reshaping. DRI is implemented in the PAS™ Parallel Acceleration System communication middleware library.
• Linux®: A general-purpose operating system similar to UNIX® that has become open and ubiquitous. Linux is widely accepted in the industry, with more than 250 commercial distributions.
• POSIX®: A set of standard operating system interfaces based on the UNIX operating system.
• VSIPL™: A library of vector, signal, and image processing mathematical functions that provides a consistent application programming interface across multiple processors.
• MPI: A practical, portable, efficient, and flexible standard for message passing.
• CORBA: A standard for transparent interoperability between objects in a heterogeneous, distributed computing environment.
• VI: An industry-standard architecture for communication within clusters of servers and workstations.