VMEbus

[3] At this point, a number of other companies involved in the 68000's ecosystem agreed to use the standard, including Signetics, Philips, Thomson, and Mostek.

Some examples are IP Module, RACEway Interlink, SCSA, Gigabit Ethernet on VME64x Backplanes, PCI Express, RapidIO, StarFabric and InfiniBand.

This was later renamed "VME", short for Versa Module European, by Lyman (Lym) Hevle, then a VP with the Motorola Microsystems Operation.

John Black of Motorola, Craig MacKenna of Mostek and Cecil Kaplinsky of Signetics developed the first draft of the VMEbus specification.

In October 1981, at the System '81 trade show in Munich, West Germany, Motorola, Mostek, Signetics/Philips, and Thomson CSF announced their joint support of the VMEbus.

In late 1987, a technical committee was formed under VITA under the direction of IEEE to create the first military, conduction-cooled 6U × 160 mm, fully electrically and mechanically compatible, VMEbus board co-chaired by Dale Young (DY4 Systems) and Doug Patterson (Plessey Microsystems, then Radstone Technology).

In 1989, John Peters of Performance Technologies Inc. developed the initial concept of VME64: multiplexing address and data lines (A64/D64) on the VMEbus.

In 1993, new activities began on the base-VME architecture, involving the implementation of high-speed serial and parallel sub-buses for use as I/O interconnections and data mover subsystems.

Numerous other documents ( including mezzanine, P2 and serial bus standards) have been placed with VITA as the Public Domain Administrator of these technologies.

Below is an incomplete table of address modifiers: On the VME bus, all transfers are DMA and every card is a master or slave.

In most bus standards, there is a considerable amount of complexity added in order to support various transfer types and master/slave selection.

For instance, with the ISA bus, both of these features had to be added alongside the existing "channels" model, whereby all communications was handled by the host CPU.

This makes VME considerably simpler at a conceptual level while being more powerful, though it requires more complex controllers on each card.

VITA offers a comprehensive FAQ to assist with the front end design and development of VME systems.