Although not as famous among the public as PCI, IDE or CompactPCI (News - Alert), VMEbus is a computer bus architecture popular in industrial automation, medical, high-end telecommunications and military applications, known for its ruggedness and longevity in the marketplace.

 

It was Motorola’s (News - Alert) Jack Kister who in 1979 devised the VERSAbus specification to support Motorola’s then-new 68000 processor family. John Black teamed up with Kister to further develop and refine the specification and the resulting VERSAmodule product lines. Sven Rau and Max Loesel of Motorola-Europe then took the VERSAbus and applied to the then-new DIN connectors and the Eurocard mechanicals being developed in the IEC, thus creating “VERSAbus-E” and renaming it “VMEbus”.

 

John Black of Motorola, Craig MacKenna of Mostek, and Cecil Kaplinski of Signetics further developed the VERSAbus document into Revision A of the VMEbus specification. By the time the October “Systems 81” Conference in Munich, Germany rolled around, Motorola, Mostek, Philips/Signetics and Thomson (News - Alert) CSF announced their support for VMEbus.

 

Today, VME has a huge installed base. After a period in the 1990s when VME got “fat, dumb and happy” and was eclipsed in the late 1990s by CompactPCI, with its hot-swap card capability and its faster bus, and which dominated the telecom market, VMEbus underwent what Yours Truly calls “The Great VMEbus Revival” in 2002.

 

And now, Emerson Network Power (News - Alert) (www.emersonnetworkpower.com), a business of Emerson, has announced the MVME4100, its fastest single-core, next-generation VMEbus processing blade. The MVME4100 joins the recently announced MVME7100 — Emerson Network Power’s highest performance VMEbus single-board computer — as the newest additions to a long line of leading-edge VME technology developed for industrial, medical and defense/aerospace original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

 

Featuring a 1.3 GHz processor and a host of top-notch I/O options, the MVME4100 extends Emerson Network Power’s presence in the VME market by enhancing the existing PowerPC technology roadmap and providing a number of migration options for legacy VME products. Specifically designed to allow users to bolster performance and features for competitive advantage, Emerson’s VMEbus computing blades also provide backwards compatibility to protect their investment in existing VMEbus technologies.

 

Equipped with expanded processing power for I/O and data-intensive applications, the MVME4100’s 8548E system-on-chip PowerPC processor features a double-precision embedded scalar and vector floating-point APU that delivers next-generation, floating-point processing performance for today’s demanding high-precision applications. The processor’s best-in-class supplementary encryption engine also allows users to address the industry’s continually growing demands for network privacy and security.

 

The MVME4100 also scores high marks in storage innovation with a range of storage capabilities including 4GB of fully-programmable NAND Flash memory, 2GB of on-board DDR2 SDRAM and 512KB of cutting-edge, non-volatile MVRAM memory. The blade’s I/O capabilities include advanced 2eSSR protocol availability capable of bandwidth up to 320 MB/s, 4 GigE ports, 3 serial ports, USB 2.0 compatibility and PCI-E expansion options for maximum performance and flexibility. In addition, the board’s I/O and firmware are fully backward-compatible with existing MVME3100 and 7100 models to ensure easy interoperability with legacy hardware.