While some industry pundits still predict the eventual demise of VME, wares like Extreme Engineering Solutions’ XCalibur1531 6U VME single board computer just go to show that old faithful is still alive and kicking. And even thriving: This SBC is souped up for today’s high-performance mil apps, kicked into high gear with a Freescale MPC8572E PowerQUICC III processor fully loaded with two e500 Power Architecture cores speeding along at rates up to 1.5 GHz. Also contributing to XCalibur1531’s high throttle is its memory: Up to 256 MB NOR flash (with redundancy) and 16 GB NAND, in addition to up to 4 GB (two channels) of DDR2-800 SDRAM including ECC.
Meanwhile, I/O detailing includes two XMC/PrPMC interfaces, three USB 2.0 ports, and a SATA 3.0 Gbps port. The SBC also lends support for XMC I/O, PMC I/O, four GbE ports, plus P2/P0 backplane connectors and/or RS-232/422/485 serial ports on the front panel. And the behind-the-scenes driver, of course, is the Board Support Package (BSP). This one’s got four BSP courses to race on: Wind River VxWorks, Green Hills INTEGRITY, Linux, or QNX Neutrino. And XCalibur1531 bodes well against strong headwinds – or other aspects of harsh environments – with 5 ruggedization levels, including rugged air-cooled and conduction-cooled, the latter of which operates at -40 °C to +85 °C.
