New European Standards Organization Forming: Is This Another Search For Cold Fusion?

By Ray Alderman, Executive Director of VITA

Industry news sources are reporting that a new standards organization is being formed in Europe to deal with embedded computers and compete against VITA and PICMG. You are probably scratching your head about this, so let’s dissect this article and see what's going on. On the surface, there’s a certain aroma of nationalism here, and maybe a whiff of protectionism as well.

1. This effort is being initiated in Europe. At present, the value of the euro is falling like a refrigerator down an elevator shaft. Government spending in the EU is 50% or more of their GDP, and all euro-countries are adopting austerity measures to deal with their massive sovereign debt problems. Analysts say that the EU is already in recession (ie., negative GDP growth). As the euro falls, imports get more expensive for them. However, the price of their exports will be cheap. It’s clear that the EU financial situation will depress EU markets, so they have to develop a framework for exports of embedded computers. As a response to the deterioration of their EU markets, this makes some sense, financially speaking. Analysts forecast that the euro will hit $1.18 in the next few months, and be at parity with the U.S. dollar by the end of 2012.

2. Three companies are initiating this new activity, but they remain anonymous until the official announcement at Embedded World in Nuremburg in late February. There is no mention of customer involvement in the standards development, so we can assume that it is supplier-centric. If it is purely supplier-driven, that supports point number 1, above: that this move has more to do with EU business conditions than competing with PICMG and VITA on embedded computing standards.

3. They intend to concentrate on board form factors (mechanical dimensions), interfaces (pin-outs on connectors), and integration issues (cables), starting with the Q-7 form factor. This says they are focused on SFF (small form factor) embedded electronics, a commoditized low-margin PC-based electronics board market for benign pedestrian applications. The SFF markets are already terribly fragmented, with over 100 specifications. Are more standards for these small boards truly needed?

4. They claim that VITA and PICMG specify and fix certain connectors in their standards, and that action is limiting and inappropriate. I can’t speak for PICMG here, but the reason that certain connectors are specified in VITA’s standards are to guarantee interoperability between multiple boards from different vendors, at the mechanical, electrical, and logical layers. By not specifying a certain connector in the standard, it suggests that they have no interest in interoperability between multiple vendor’s products. They have a point here that makes some sense. Most SFF products are built with a “reference design” from the PC processor vendor. That PC processor vendor moves things around with each release of the reference design, and sometimes changes connectors and pin-outs for certain interfaces, like the graphics output from the board. Requiring a specific connector and pin-out in their standard would violate the “reference design” when the PC processor vendor changes things every 18 months. So, it’s clear that this group wants to stay in compliance with new “reference designs,” at the expense of interoperability of multiple vendors’ products at the connector and pin-out level. It’s also clear that this new group is not interested in creating standards for backplane-based high-performance systems.

5. This group claims that VITA and PICMG are too slow in completing their standards. It takes more high-level engineering expertise, time, and work to create a standard that guarantees interoperability at the mechanical, electrical, and logical layers for multiple vendors’ boards. VITA’s standards create complex computer architectures. SFF boards have all the architectural decisions made for them in the reference design from the PC processor vendor, and contained on a single PCB (ie., the motherboard). All these commodity board vendors need to deal with are the constant changes in the connectors and pin-outs to the graphics, disk, and other I/O devices that are dictated by the PC processor vendor, as the reference designs change. So their claim, that VITA takes too long to complete a standard, is based on their complete lack of engineering knowledge about the complexities of computer architectures. These people don’t have a clue about meshes, stars, double-stars, or switched multiprocessor architectures. So, it’s again clear that the standards they want to create are for single-processor low-performance computer boards.

6. This new standards group harbors resentment for U.S.-based standards groups. They claim that the U.S. is better at marketing. They further claim that Europeans create wonderful technology, bring it into U.S. standards organizations, and get no credit. The West has been advancing technological innovation for decades. Then it moves east into Europe, as an import. Creating some minor SFF board standards, based on reference designs created in the U.S., does not solve the innovation problem in Europe.

Compared to the advanced high-performance computing architectures engineered at VITA, the standards this new group intends to create are technically unsanitary. But in their increasingly dystopian European markets, it’s probably the best option they could come up with. What they are actually creating is a “landfill technology”: when the boards need replacement or upgrading, you just throw them away.

While this group picks at VITA and PICMG standards from an uninformed point of view, they really seem to be dumping mostly on the connector industry. They have no cost control for the silicon they buy from US processor makers, who create the reference designs. If they must use a connector defined in a standard, they lose cost control of those elements too. So, if they want to increase their paltry margins, they have to do it with the cheapest connectors they can find.

At VITA, we need the connector industry vendors involved in our standards. They are a critical part of our efforts, to create reliable operation of 10G-40G-100G signals in the advanced computer architectures of the future. We must define a specific connector on backplanes and even SFF boards aimed at critical embedded systems, to guarantee they will function when exposed to extreme temperatures, heavy shock and vibration, and contaminated air. There is no competition between VITA and this group: They are aiming at the most benign environments with their standards efforts. And, they are aiming at the lowest price/margin segment of the embedded computer industry.

This situation reminds me of Ronald Richter, a German-Argentinean nuclear scientist, who announced he had created fusion in 1951 with his “thermotron.” Argentine President Juan Peron, with huge fanfare and a media blitz to claim glory for his country, stated that Argentina had skunked the superpowers and found the secret to unlimited energy. Peron sent an entourage of scientists to Richter's lab, to verify his experiments and assuage the criticism of the Western scientists who said the discovery was baloney. Richter was acting erratic and bizarre upon their arrival and injected gunpowder into his apparatus, destroying it. A piece of radium, placed near Richter’s radiation detectors (that sensed fusion had taken place), registered no response:  his claims were completely bogus.

So what’s really going on? This group would be a lot better off simply explaining what they are really doing instead of picking on VITA. The commodity SFF market looks like an Arkansas trailer park after a tornado, and these guys are just roaming around in the debris.

Ray Alderman is the executive director for VITA. Previously, Alderman served with the U.S. Army’s military intelligence during the Vietnam War, founded and partnered in several startup companies, and was the CEO of PEP Modular Computers. Contact him at exec@vita.com.