Design Philosophy

Open Standards

BittWare strongly supports open industry standards that enable companies to develop innovative products that are interoperable with other third party products. By supporting these hardware and software standards we provide our customers with products that they can easily develop applications for, scale to their projects' needs, and integrate with third party hardware and software. BittWare products are designed to open standards such as CompactPCI (CPCI), VMEbus (VME), PCI, PMC, PC/104, PC104/Plus, and AdvancedMC for AdvancedTCA carrier cards and MicroTCA.

BittWare is a member of VITA, an incorporated, non-profit organization of vendors and users having a common market interest in real-time, modular embedded computing systems. BittWare currently supports the following VITA standards:

VITA 46 (VPX)

VPX is a proposed ANSI standard that provides VMEbus-based systems with support for switched fabrics over a new high speed connector. Defined by the VITA working group, iit 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, Infiniband and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. VPX gives the large existing base of VMEbus users access to these switched fabrics.

VITA 41 VME Switched Serial (VXS)

VITA 41, VMEbus Switched Serial or VXS, is a proposed ANSI standard that combines parallel VMEbus with enhancements to support switched serial fabrics including PCI Express, RapidIO, StarFabric and InfiniBand over a new high speed P0 connector. Backward compatibility is maintained with existing backplanes that do not have a conflicting P0 scheme. Combining the VME2eSST parallel bus with switch fabric technologies for multi-point, high-speed data transfers creates choices for embedded computing designs of all types. The standard also incorporates ANSI/VITA 1.7, allowing more DC power input into each board.

VITA 41.2 Serial RapidIO in VXS

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

BittWare is a member of the PICMG, the governing body of the PCI Trade Association. We contribute to the PICMIG working groups that are actively renewing the cPCI and ATCA architecture and ecosystem. We currently support the following PICMIG standards:

• Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC)
• 3U and 6U CompactPCI
• PCI – PCI-SIG
• PMC