INDUSTRY TEAMINGS
17 Mar 09. Leading COTS embedded board, subsystem and backplane and enclosure vendors, including Curtiss-Wright Controls, Elma Electronic, Carlo Gavazzi, and X-ES Inc have issued a joint statement of support for the proven open standard approach to the development of bus and board system architectures. The companies wish to reiterate and reinforce the importance of maintaining the integrity and openness of the VITA
Standards Organization (VSO), an arm of the industry’s most successful and long-lived trade association of which each of the companies is a member. The companies jointly issued the following statement: “The cooperative work of the members of the VITA Standards Organization (VSO) resulted in the creation and evolution of VME, for over 25 years the de facto board architecture of choice for the aerospace and defense market, and, more recently, VPX (VITA 46/48), a higher performance, more flexible enhancement to VME. The spirit of ‘coopetition’ and openness that brought VSO’s members, including competing vendors and users, together for the common good of the industry reflects and embodies the standards body’s basic principles that ensure fairness, inclusion and consensus for all participants. These principles have fostered and guided the success of VITA since its inception in 1984, then under the stewardship of VITA’s founding director Lyman C. Hevle, and the VSO one of the electronics industry’s most respected standards body, since its formation in 1993. We recognize the importance of defining an open specification for system-level VPX interoperability, but we also believe that this work is best done within the existing, proven model of the VSO Working Group system. The open forum provided by VITA is the right and best place for the industry to cooperatively develop the critical new VPX initiatives destined for use by important customers such as the US military. We recommend the formation of a VSO Working Group on VPX interoperability for VITA 46 (VPX) to help resolve issues and speed the development of a common VPX backplane architecture while ensuring that no single company or selective group of companies is able to exert undo
influence on the specification and unfairly benefit from the cooperative work of all the member companies who have contributed resources and efforts over many years to the standard’s development.” The VSO’s fundamental principle, as stated on VITA’s website is: “Within the VSO no one individual holds the power to decide what technology may become a standard – that power belongs solely to the membership.” The joint statement above is made in the spirit of this principle.
18 Mar 09. Michelin, Lockheed Martin’s Savi Technology, Texas Instruments and others are forming the DASH7™ Alliance, a cross-industry initiative to expand the use of a wireless data technology commonly used in the global defense industry but increasingly used by commercial customers. The U.S. Department of Energy and three of its laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, as well as the University of Pittsburgh plan to serve as technical advisors. The technology, based on the ISO 18000-7 standard, provides commercial and government users with the ability to track the whereabouts and status of a wide range of everyday objects, including vehicles, shipping containers, pharmaceutical products, hazardous materials, perishable goods and manufacturing and operational equipment. The DASH7 Alliance will work to ensure cross-vendor interoperability as well as to promote greater use of the ISO 18000-7 wireless data standard, which is more cost effective, more reliable, and operates at lower power levels than ZigBee and similar wireless data technologies. The DASH7 Alliance will also foster new wireless data innovations based on the standard, including advanced sensor networking, electronic seals, mobile phone integration, and other advance