SAN JOSE, Calif., 3 Nov. 2010. Electronic chassis designers at Extreme Engineering Solutions Inc. (X-ES) in Middleton, Wis., say they have come up with a way to help engineers developing air transport rack (ATR)-packaged avionics and other electronic systems to write software and make other enhancements quickly without dealing with the difficult connectors and confines of the ATR rack itself.
X-ES is doing this with the Avionics Development Platform (ADP), a electronics and backplane enclosure that acts as a 3U OpenVPX development platform that provides the kinds of functionality and I/O that avionics designers typically need for their ATR-packaged applications.
The ADP enables avionics designers to develop deployed hardware and software in parallel to reduce overall development schedule and risk. X-ES has sold the ADP to three defense prime contractors so far, says Bret Farnum, vice president of sales and marketing at X-ES, and is introducing the system as a product this week at the MILCOM trade show in San Jose, Calif. "Our first ADP customer is saving six months in their development schedules," Farnum says. "This level of integration in a lab system gives customers a 100 percent functional duplication of their flight hardware and provides tremendous value to customers developing avionics systems."
The ASP is not a deployable system, Farnum cautions, so does not have the construction to withstand the shock, vibration, and other extreme operation conditions of airborne applications, yet includes standard interfaces typically found in avionics applications, such as MIL-STD-1553, MIL-STD-188-203-1A (ATDS), and ARINC-429 avionics databus interfaces, as well as 28-volt GPIO. The payload modules in the ADP are the same conduction-cooled modules that will go into the deployed avionics system, X-ES officials say.
The ADP OpenVPX development chassis supports conduction-cooled payload modules, an OpenVPX backplane, and air-cooled RTMs. Other features include development power supply; RTM bay; 10 one-inch pitch slots for 3U conduction-cooled modules; 3U OpenVPX backplane with eight payload slots, two switch slots, and two power slots; and 3U VPX single board computer based on the Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core i7, Freescale MPC8640D, MPC8572E, P2020, or P4080 processor.
Options include 3U VPX PCI Express and Gigabit Ethernet integrated switch; 28-volt, eight channel, isolated GPIO XMC; eight, dual redundant, MIL-STD-1553 channels PMC; four, dual redundant, MIL-STD-1553 channels, sixteen receive and six transmit ARINC 429 channels PMC; MIL-STD-188-203-1A (ATDS) interface PMC; multi-protocol four port serial PMC; and 80-gigabyte SSD XMC or 128-gigabyte removable SSD storage module.
For more information contact X-ES online at xes-inc.com.
