Over the past decade, more light has been shed on the real and debilitating problem of electronics obsolescence. Across the embedded electronics industry, there is growing recognition of both the costs that legacy products carry and the long-term value they provide to customers. And while the industry has made meaningful progress in how it approaches legacy product discontinuation, significant challenges remain—particularly when it comes to how we think about solving these problems in the first place.
Historically, engineers and product teams tend to take problems inward, relying on internal teams to fix things themselves. But even when in-house solutions are possible, it is worth asking: Should we be solving this ourselves?
Embedded OEMs care deeply about their customers—both new and legacy. But when it comes to sustaining aging designs, many still default to inefficient, fragmented approaches that drain internal resources and inject frustration across the organization. The industry has seen these patterns play out time and again, yet the pull of the familiar remains strong.
Despite improvements in awareness and tooling, embedded OEMs often struggle to explore more effective alternatives to meet ongoing demand for discontinued products. In many cases, it is not a lack of options, it is a hesitation to step away from what is known.
The Enduring Value of Robust Legacy Tech: The VME Example
Take the VMEbus standard and the MVME product families originally pioneered by Motorola. At GDCA, we continue to sustain many of these products under license, decades after their introduction. Why? Because VME exemplifies the kind of robust, long-lived designs based on VITA standards that continue to deliver in mission-critical environments.
The VME standard’s use of rugged Eurocard formats (like 6U and 3U) and highly reliable pin-and-socket connectors makes it inherently well-suited for harsh physical conditions—significantly more so than edge connectors. And VME's architecture offered real advantages at the time of its adoption:
- True multiprocessing support, allowing multiple processors to operate efficiently on the same backplane.
- Asynchronous bus design, enabling peripherals with different speeds to coexist without degrading performance.
- Deterministic performance, with a well-defined interrupt structure ideal for real-time control applications.
- Open, non-proprietary standard, which fostered a competitive, multi-vendor ecosystem and ensured long-term availability and deep domain expertise.
These characteristics helped establish VME as a foundational standard across aerospace, defense, medical, and industrial control sectors. Today, customers continue to rely on VME/MVME products for several key reasons:
- Proven Reliability: Trusted operation in the field for decades builds confidence that few newer standards can match.
- Long Platform Lifecycles: Systems built on VME were often designed for 10–30+ year lifespans. Replacing their computer infrastructure is often prohibitively expensive and requires extensive requalification.
- Backwards Compatibility and Ecosystem Maturity: Decades of development have produced compatible hardware, software, and institutional knowledge that are difficult—and risky—to abandon.
In select applications, proven performance, reliability, and ecosystem maturity outweigh the marginal benefits of higher-speed, newer buses.
The Hidden Cost of Sustaining VME Internally
While the need for sustainment is clear, OEMs face real structural challenges in doing so. Supporting long-lived standards like VME diverts time, labor, and attention from the innovation and new product development that drive an OEM’s core business.
Legacy designs often rely on obsolete semiconductors, outmoded test equipment, or tribal engineering knowledge that is difficult to replace. Documentation may predate current internal standards, and each board or system requires specialized treatment that no longer fits within standard workflows.
Even the most committed internal lifecycle support teams struggle under the weight of these demands—especially when they are distributed across departments that were not designed to manage long-term sustainment in the first place.
A Better Path Forward: Collaboration with a Legacy Equipment Manufacturer (LEM)
This is where working with a Legacy Equipment Manufacturer (LEM) like GDCA becomes transformational.
Rather than forcing embedded OEMs to absorb high-opportunity-cost work that distracts from their mission, LEMs provide dedicated, cross-functional teams whose sole focus is licensed sustainment—supporting and manufacturing legacy systems like VME with quality and reliability.
Working with a LEM is like standing up a virtual business unit focused on performance, customer satisfaction, and revenue continuity—without the operational cost, management overhead, or internal disruption. It restores capacity to internal teams, provides a stable path forward for legacy customers, and preserves brand equity built over decades.
Even when documentation is incomplete or support infrastructure has eroded, an experienced LEM can evaluate the feasibility of sustainment, align with your risk thresholds, and deliver a reliable solution.
The First Step Is Rethinking the Problem
Before any of this becomes possible, OEMs have to make a subtle but crucial mindset shift.
That shift begins by recognizing the full value that legacy products still deliver—and being honest about how much it really costs to support them in-house. Once that reality is clear, new options emerge. And for long-lived, field-proven technologies like VME, collaborating with a sustainment partner may be the most strategic decision you can make.
