By Ben Ames
MARLBOROUGH, MASS. — Designers of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter have ambitious goals for the next-generation airplane. It has to be stealthy, supersonic, and flexible enough to satisfy pilots in the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and various international allies.
One element will hold all those variables together, delivering data from one end of the plane to the other regardless of its configuration. The StarFabric backplane interconnect will run the plane's electronic warfare systems, planners at BAE Systems announced recently.
StarFabric architecture, made by StarGen, a semiconductor company in Marlborough, Mass., will act as a homogenous communications structure to unite processing components and hardware-based functional components.
This is StarGen's first deal with BAE, but it is not new to the air. Designers at companies like Dy 4, Radstone, and Thales have often specified StarFabric for avionics applications in aircraft, missiles, radar, and communications, said Tom Tinory, StarGen's director of technical marketing.
StarFabric will provide the high-speed data connection for electronic warfare functions on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, serving as the communications structure between processors and various hardware elements.
StarFabric serves those applications well because of its strength in performing interprocessor communication, scaling up a network of two or four processors to 16, 32, or more, all without changing the software infrastructure, he said.
That is crucial for applications such as radar signal processing, in which the system takes incoming data and quickly runs it through a Fourier transform algorithm, passes it on to multiple processors, collates the result, and passes that data on to communications processors to display on a screen.
"We like to say we're in the transportation business, since we hardly touch the bits that flow," Tinory said. "We're really good at leveraging that simplicity."
As a switched serial interconnect, StarFabric is simpler to upgrade than a stack-based system like Ethernet, which is fast but demands extra overhead to handle multiprocessor communication, he said. Another popular option is the parallel databus, but that technology is less flexible than switched serial in bandwidth, scaling, and cost.
Switched serial interconnects also boast high availability, since they can survive failed components by automatically rerouting data traffic, then using a hot-swapped replacement when they reach the shop.
As for speed, a StarFabric link will run at 220 megabytes/second, or twice that speed for a bundled pair. Today's Ethernet runs at 10 to 100 megabits/second, though the pending Gigabit Ethernet will run much faster.
Of course, no single technology can solve every challenge. In addition to StarFabric, the Joint Strike Fighter will actually use as many as three other network protocols to move data, including FibreChannel for its avionics, 1394b FireWire for its vehicle systems, 1553 databus for weapons, and EBR-1553 (the Miniature Munitions/Store Interface) for its Small Diameter Bombs.
Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the Joint Strike Fighter, and partners with Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems for various subsystems.
In November, workers began fabricating the first F-35 airframes, keeping the project on schedule to produce its first finished aircraft in mid-2005, according to the Lockheed Martin website.
Once in full production, the F-35 will replace a half-dozen aging strike and fighter aircraft, such as the AV-8B Harrier, A-10, F-16, F/A-18, and the U.K.'s Harrier GR.7 and Sea Harrier.
