Concurrent Technologies announces two low-cost, off the shelf, 3U OpenVPX Development Systems to complement their growing OpenVPX family of boards.

A key benefit of these two systems is to speed the development of applications e.g. software development, board prototyping and system performance testing prior to the commissioning of a fully ruggedized target. Each Development System is a free-standing 3U VPX chassis with a backplane supporting a controller slot and two peripheral slots. The SY VPX/3x3 systems come preconfigured with either an Intel® Atom™ or an Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor board, each with a x4 PCI Express® fabric to the two peripheral slots. Both systems include a 3U VPX Mass Storage module, which leaves the third VPX slot available for an additional board. VPX is particularly suitable for the security, defense and aerospace markets.

The SY VPX/3x3 is a free-standing Development System, providing three 3U slots and includes two Concurrent Technologies’ boards leaving one slot available for customer configuration. Each slot is 8HP (1.6 inches) which has the benefit of accommodating 0.8-inch, 0.85-inch or 1.0-inch boards while leaving easy access for test probes via the front of the chassis. The system includes a 250W universal power supply and cooling, and is compatible with the VITA 46 VPX and VITA 65 OpenVPX specifications.

The installed boards are commercial grade OpenVPX boards, designed by Concurrent Technologies:

- TR 501/36x – 1.86 GHz Intel® Core™2 Duo processor board fitted with 4 Gbytes of DDR3-1066 SDRAM (used in the SY VPX/313)
- TR A40/30x – 1.6 GHz Intel® Atom™ processor board fitted with 2 Gbytes of DDR2-533 SDRAM (used in the SY VPX/303)
- TR MS1/321 – Mass Storage Module fitted with a 2.5-inch SATA300 storage drive (used in both systems)
The processor boards are able to support an XMC module as well as provide a range of off-board functions: dual Fat-Pipes (dual x4 PCI Express®) plus dual SATA300 channels on the backplane and rear I/O functions including XMC I/O, GPIO signals, Gigabit Ethernet, RS232/422/485, USB ports and graphics interfaces. For ease of connectivity to external devices during the development phase, the system also includes a rear transition module to provide access via standard connectors. The SY VPX/313, which uses the TR 501/36x processor board, provides further flexibility at the development phase by supporting an easy to access front panel with analog graphics, USB, Fast Ethernet and RS232 connectors.

The TR MS1/321 Mass Storage Module supports a 2.5-inch SATA300 storage drive and a CompactFlash site accessed via the two SATA channels connected to the system’s processor board. An optional 3U OpenVPX XMC/PMC carrier with full front and rear I/O, the TR XMC/301, is also available to enable installation, testing and development of XMC or PMC modules.

The SY VPX/303 and SY VPX/313 Development Systems use Concurrent Technologies’ commercial off the shelf boards. These boards are also available as rugged conduction cooled, VPX-REDI boards ensuring that applications which are produced on the SY VPX3x3 Development Systems can be easily progressed to a ruggedized implementation. Since the processor boards support many of today’s leading operating systems, including Linux®, Windows® XP, Windows® XP Embedded, Windows® Server 2003, Windows® Server 2008, Solaris®, VxWorks® and QNX® the system is suitable for a wide range of user configured applications.

Concurrent Technologies provides a range of VPX boards and VPX-REDI boards.