Presentation Titles and Abstracts

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Get Onboard: How an Open-Standards Industrial Base Accelerates Innovation to the Field 

David Jedynak

The DoD’s newest acquisition directives make one thing clear: the days of slow integration, bespoke hardware, and endless prototypes that never reach the field are over. If innovators want their technology to matter - and if the government wants capability at the speed of relevance - then the entire ecosystem must start with open, modular, standards-based foundations.

This presentation is a call to action for the entire defense technology community - government program offices, emerging “New Defense” vendors, legacy primes, investors, and standards bodies. The defense industrial base already possesses an enormous ecosystem of interoperable, MOSA-aligned compute, networking, storage, and mission systems. Yet far too many programs, startups, labs, and investments ignore it entirely - wasting precious time and money reinventing what already exists.

The message is simple: If you build on open standards, you can field innovation fast. If you don’t, you’ll likely get stuck in the valley of death.

The Emerging Impact of VNX+ on Tomorrow’s Embedded Designs

Mark Littlefield

VNX+ is rapidly evolving from a standardization effort into a viable architecture for next‑generation embedded computing. With early products already emerging, the ecosystem is entering a pivotal stage of innovation and market readiness. Adopting this new form factor involves several strategic considerations that will shape how suppliers and integrators design their next wave of systems.

This presentation will outline how VNX+ both builds on and diverges from OpenVPX, highlighting the architectural advances, integration impacts, and technology trends that industry leaders need to track. It will actually expose some important “lessons learned"and enable attendees to gain a forward‑looking perspective on the opportunities and design directions that will guide the transition into the VITA 100 era and the broader evolution of embedded computing. 

Ethan Plotkin

Unlocking Potential: The Growing Value Proposition of the In-Development VITA 100.20 (System Management for VITA 100) Standard

Dan Toohey

It has been almost one year since the chartering and inaugural kickoff working group meeting for VITA 100.20, System Management for VITA 100. Over this time, substantial progress has been made toward the creation of the standard, some of which has driven changes to the VITA 100 base standard content. This presentation will provide an update on the status of the creation of the VITA 100.20 standard, including the latest plan of record to arrive at a first revision release. An overview of VITA 100.20’s logical and physical architectures will be introduced and traced to a few implementation examples of VITA 100.20 at a Plug-in Module (PIM) and chassis level. Finally, some use cases addressed by the standard, that drive up the value proposition for VITA 100.20, will be presented.   

A Pathway for Modular Hardware into Common Practice: Modular Application Platform Products

Michael Moore

This presentation introduces a vision for the defense embedded electronics market where VITA-based hardware products are sold with pre-integrated management software that dramatically reduces the time required to field new capabilities to warfighters. 

Modular Application Platform products include built-in software services implementing open standard interfaces for managing the platform hardware, networks, security, runtime, and applications. This approach realizes MOSA objectives, enabling defense organizations to rapidly deploy advanced, interoperable solutions while fostering a more competitive vendor landscape. Embracing and developing products including management standards from VITA and SOSA(TM) shifts the primary challenge from technology development to establishing effective business models for software development. The session will describe the MAP vision, highlight use cases relevant to acquisition and operation, and discuss potential market dynamics.

VITA 93 QMC: The Rugged Compute SOM for More Than Just I/O

Jake Braegelmann

Ryan Jansen 

The VITA 93 QMC standard has applicability far beyond I/O centric use cases. The proliferation of affordable mass efforts in the defense market including drones, air launched effects, missiles, ground vehicles, packable electronic warfare solutions, etc. demand an affordable, rugged, and modular small form-factor compute approach. To support this demand, the embedded computing market has been searching for a standards-based System on Module (SoM) that meets ruggedization levels similar to VPX. VITA 93 has the potential to answer this market demand in a meaningful way. This presentation will review the opportunities and challenges for the VITA 93 standard to meet the moment. 

Justin Moll

The next generation architectures such as VITA 100 and VNX+ are still being developed or finalized.   With existing technologies like VITA 91 for high-density signaling and other hybrid approaches, a stepping-stone approach can be taken to become ready - today.   

Enabling Next-Gen Rugged System Topologies with the New VITA 90™ Family of Standards

David Givens

The VITA OpenVPX™ family of standards have defined rugged, high-reliability computing system topologies for decades. Leveraging the proven engineering strategies of OpenVPX, VITA 90 VNX+™ continues the modular open-system design approach in a small form factor (SFF) targeting smaller, denser, and faster applications.  Additionally, VITA 90 VNX+ includes several new features such as optimized pin assignments, system management capabilities, power modules and coaxial and optical I/O connectors allowing comprehensive system design approaches in legacy and emerging applications.  In this presentation, David Givens from Samtec will provide a holistic overview of the VITA 90 family of standards while highlighting real-world case studies illustrating the efficacy of VITA 90 VNX+ in system design.

How tomorrow’s transceivers meet tomorrow’s needs

Anders Thelin

A summary of observed demands of the market, focusing on the need for performance and reliability at high temperature. Examples of what drives these demands and introduction to fiber optic transceiver technologies that address this. Exploration of how transceiver standardization can help customers and how potential configurations can support both today’s and tomorrow’s technology. 

When Innovation Outruns Platforms: Why VITA 93 QMC Changes Embedded System Design

Tim Tews

Jan Zimmermann

Embedded systems are increasingly required to combine long-term platform stability with rapidly evolving technologies. As innovation cycles accelerate and component lifecycles shorten, traditional architectures struggle with obsolescence, redesign effort, and lifecycle risk. This presentation examines how the VITA 93 QMC standard addresses this challenge by decoupling platform lifetime from technology refresh. It highlights recent progress since the publication of VITA 93, growing ecosystem adoption, and ongoing developments such as VITA 93.1 QTMs. The presentation also explores how modular architectures enable sustainable innovation, connect VITA and PICMG ecosystems, and redefine future-ready embedded system design.