Following its development in the late 1970s by Motorola, VME bus continues to see wide use across many different equipment industries today. In fact, the first COTS VME boards to enter the domestic market (c 1983) were the MVME101 CPU and MVME110 CPU, both of which are still supported by GDCA today (though no one’s asked in a while).

Founded in 1984 from the VME Manufacturers Group, the VMEbus International Trade Association (VITA) champions working groups formed to develop specifications and standards important to designers of critical embedded systems around the world.

Considering our VME legacy and long-standing support for the folks at VITA, you can imagine how excited we were when VITA debuted their new, member-only conference, Embedded Tech Trends, January 16^th and 17^th, in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

Formerly known as the Bus and Board Conference, Embedded Tech Trends (or ETT 2012) is the “business and technology forum for critical embedded systems.” This year’s focus was VITA technology applications, and the “fruits of the spec-developer’s labor.”

Since its inception, VITA has provided a needed forum to discuss the latest advancements, design wins, and products, and has offered a singular place where all members could share their insights and experiences, keeping VME a robust platform for future generations of mission critical end-user applications.

For our part, we haven’t forgotten that the end of a product’s life-cycle is just as important as its beginning. In fact, it isn’t practical for most embedded manufacturers to continue indefinite support of their products (VME or otherwise), and typically EOL occurs after these products are 5-7 years old. While we’re excited to continue our long-term support of all our VME (and other system) lines, it was also good to hear new VME and VPX products are expected to be in demand for at least another 5 years.

 Steve & the GDCA Team