A designer and manufacturer of high-performance backplanes offers its 3U six-slot OpenVPX backplane with a twisted-ring routing topology. Elma Bustronic Corp, Fremont, CA, created the new backplane in compliance with VITA 65 specifications for OpenVPX.  The six-slot backplane has configurable thin pipe links for distributed gigabit Ethernet for slots one through five, and two fat pipes for rear I/O. Any or all of the P1 thin pipes in slots one through five assigned to the control channel star can be reconfigured as rear I/O by removing zero ohm SMT shunts. All P2 differential pairs in slots one through five are available on the rear side for I/O. For system management applications, software and firmware upgrades, and initiating new processes on specific boards, the backplane also features a gigabit Ethernet control plane. The control plane provides a separate star or dual-star network for out-of-band communication.