Renesas is a market leader in Versa Module Eurocard (VME) interconnect technology with over twenty years of experience providing VME bridge solutions and, and technical support to the embedded systems industry. The Universe™ II product dominates the VME bridge interconnect market and enhances the performance of traditional VME-based applications for military, communications, industrial automation, and medical imaging.
Renesas’ Universe II VME to PCI bridge provides a high-performance, direct-connect interface between the VMEbus backplane and the local PCI bus. The VME bridge is ideally suited for processor and peripheral I/O boards that function as both a master and slave in the VMEbus system. The Universe II VMEbus bridge product supports the VME64 and VME64 Extension standards, which enable data transfer rates of 80Mbytes/s. On the local bus, support exists for a 33MHz, 64-bit PCI bus. Three independent data paths (PCI to VMEbus, VMEbus to PCIi, and DMA) exist to enable effective, high-performance data transfers to occur within the VMEbus system. With this architecture, customers have greater flexibility in determining how to implement their system-level software to ensure the optimal VMEbus performance is obtained. The VME bridge also contains complete VMEbus system controller functionality, enabling single-board computers to be used within any slot in the VME system.
Universe™ IID VME to PCI Bridge (VME Bridge)
The Universe™ IID (also known as Universe II) is the industry standard VME to PCI bridge. Bridging is accomplished via a powerful decoupled architecture with independent FIFOs for inbound, outbound and DMA traffic. With this architecture, throughput is maximized without sacrificing bandwidth on either bus. Universe bridges between the VME 64-bit bus (VME64) to either a 32- or 64-bit PCI bus at 33MHz.
A zero-wait state implementation, with multi-beat transactions and support for bus parking, ensures that the Universe II is never the bottleneck on the PCI bus. On the VME64 interface, a rich set of features ensures that the device fits within a wide range of applications. A full suite of addressing and data modes is implemented, including BLT and MBLT support. In addition, a fully-featured system controller, interrupter, interrupt handler, and Linked-List DMA make the Universe II VME to PCI bridge a flexible system interconnect device.
The Universe II VME to PCI bridge is known for its standards compliance, compatibility, reliability, a large number of available device drivers, and the stability of supply. These are just some of the reasons the device has become the industry’s preferred method for connecting PCI to the VME64 bus.
About the VMEbus and VME64
VMEbus, including VME64, is a computer bus standard, originally developed for the Motorola 68000 line of CPUs, but later widely used for many applications and standardized by the IEC as ANSI/IEEE 1014-1987. It is physically based on Eurocard sizes, mechanicals and connectors (DIN 41612), but uses its own signaling system. The original standard was defined as a 16-bit bus compatible with existing Eurocard DIN connectors. Since its inception, the bus has evolved to allow wider bus widths. The current VME64 includes a full 64-bit bus in 6U-sized cards and 32-bit in 3U cards.
