Pros/Cons of different backplane architectures?
If this is professional interest, the VITA standards documents are available for $300 or so for a CD of all of them.

Edit to add: what are you looking for? Performance, price, ubiquity, etc?

Edit: some additional thoughts. Will add to these as I think of them.


COTS Journal, Embedded Computing Design, and similar trade magazines have high level technical articles on these interfaces. Caveat emptor, since the articles are written by vendors.
For ADC/DAC applications, how much bandwith do you really need? If this is a control/sensing application (LVDT, etc), you may not need more than a few tens of KHz/channel. Which might imply that you don't need a x16 PCIe interface. My experience is that a lot of folks tend to spec as much CPU, RAM, Flash, and IO bandwidth as they can get. Even if they need to move a few dozen bytes every 50 mSec.
If you're looking at commercial cards or chassis, you should also consider IO card availability. Don't forget the possibility of using PMC/XMC cards on carriers.
I would stay away from anything that doesn't have a decent ecosystem yet. VME and cPCI are safe. RapidIO? StarFabric? Maybe not there in 5 years.
I think VPX's costs will kill it. $140 per board connector, x3 for a 3U IO card? Really?