White Paper

WHITE PAPER SOSA and VITA Working Together for Next-Gen Defense Systems mrcy.com 2 INTRODUCTION The SOSA™ (Sensor Open Systems Architecture) Consortium is developing common open standards for designing, building, and deploying hardware, software, and firmware components of new military electronic systems. SOSA contributing members are U.S. government organizations including the U.S. DoD, Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as key representatives from industry and universities. SOSA adopts the most appropriate subsets of existing open standards to form a multi-purpose backbone of building blocks for current and future embedded systems for Radar, EO/IR, SIGINT, EW, and communications. Objectives include vendor interoperability, lower procurement costs, easier new technology upgrades, quicker reaction to new requirements, and longer life cycles. Because the emerging SOSA hardware standard draws primarily from OpenVPX and other related VITA standards, the new technologies, topologies, and environmental requirements critical to meeting SOSA objectives must be supported by extensions to these VITA standards. This article is an overview of the SOSA and VITA organizations and how they interact, along with the challenges, successful strategies, and illustrative examples. The SOSA™ (Sensor Open Systems Architecture) approach establishes guidelines for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems. The objective is to allow flexibility in the selection and acquisition of sensors and subsystems that provide sensor data collection, processing, exploitation, communication and related functions over the full life cycle of the C4ISR system. VITA BACKGROUND AND MISSION Introduced to the market in 1981, the VMEbus architecture began gaining market presence with specification development and products from Motorola and other early vendors, who formed the VMEbus Manufacturers Group (now VITA) in 1983. In 1985, VITA (VMEbus International Trade Association) was founded to promote VMEbus in worldwide markets and published its first directory of 174 vendor companies and over 2,700 product families. VMEbus soon won widespread acceptance and adoption by defense, government, research, and industrial customers. The VITA Technical Committee, formed in 1987 to develop dozens of new extensions to VMEbus, evolved in 1994 into the present-day VITA Standards Organization (VSO). A year earlier, VITA became an accredited standards development organization with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). To overcome performance limitations of the parallel bus backplane of VMEbus, in 2003 VITA introduced the VITA 46 VPX standard to take advantage of new gigabit serial interconnect technology for 3U and 6U boards. In 2010, after widespread use, refinements, and serious interest in VPX for long-term defense programs, VITA announced the VITA 65 OpenVPX system specification, quickly ratified by ANSI. QuartzXM Model 6001 8-Channel A /D & D/A Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC Processor eXpress Module

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