VITA, the trade association dedicated to fostering American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited, open system architectures in critical embedded system applications announced that VITA 78 “SpaceVPX Systems” has reached ANSI recognition as ANSI/VITA 78.00-2015. This specification has completed the VITA and ANSI processes reaching full recognition under guidance of the VITA Standards Organization (VSO).
“We are pleased that SpaceVPX™ Systems has received VITA/ANSI recognition,” said Patrick Collier, Senior Electrical Research Engineer, Space Communications Program, AFRL Space Vehicles and VITA 78 Working Group Chair. “We were able to pull together the minds of engineers from companies around the world that have a vested interest in developing this specification for the space industry.”
ANSI/VITA 78 defines an open standard for creating high performance fault tolerant interoperable backplanes and modules to assemble electronic systems for spacecraft and other high availability applications. Such systems will support a wide variety of use cases and potential markets across the aerospace and terrestrial communities. This standard leverages the OpenVPX standards family and the commercial infrastructure that supports these standards.
“Patrick was and continues to be a great asset in getting this specification through the process,” stated Jerry Gipper, VITA executive director. “Without his leadership, energy, and passion it would have been extremely difficult to complete this work effort.”
The goal of SpaceVPX Systems is to achieve an acceptable level of fault tolerance while maintaining reasonable compatibility with OpenVPX components, including connector pin assignments. For the purposes of fault tolerance, a module is considered the minimum redundancy element.
