VPX, formerly known as VITA 46, provides VMEbus-based systems with support for switched fabrics over a new high speed connector. Defined by VITA, it has been designed specifically with defense applications in mind, with an enhanced module standard that enables applications and platforms with superior performance. VPX retains VME’s existing 6U and 3U form factors, supporting existing PCI mezzanine card and XMC mezzanines (PMC with high-speed serial fabric interconnect), and maintaining the maximum possible compatibility with VMEbus.

New generations of embedded computing systems based on the VPX standard reflect the growing significance of high speed serial switched fabric interconnects such as PCI Express, RapidIO, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. These technologies are starting to replace traditional parallel communications bus architectures for local communications because they offer significantly greater capability with higher bandwidth, throughput and performance. Switched fabrics provide an optimum technology to support the implementation of multiprocessing systems that require the fastest possible communications between multiple processors – as in a digital signal processing application. The offerings on the VPX platform are as follows: