VME Chassis

VME is a high-speed, high-performance bus system featuring advanced interrupt management and multiprocessor capabilities. It originated from the combination of the VERSAbus electrical specifications (1979) and the Eurocard format, leading to the first VMEbus Revision A specification in 1981. The standard was subsequently enhanced through Revisions B (1982), C, C.1, IEC 821, IEC 297, and IEEE 1014-1987.

Today, VME remains one of the most widely used industrial bus standards and is supported by the VMEbus International Trade Association (VITA). Originally based on the Motorola MC680x0 architecture, VME employs a master-slave design with 32-bit address and data buses, utilizing an asynchronous transfer mechanism.

The VME64 extension increases performance by multiplexing the 32-bit address and 32-bit data lines to enable 64-bit data transfers (D64). This allows transfer rates of up to 40 MB/s for D32 and 80 MB/s for D64 operations, as defined in ANSI/VITA 1-1994.