Abaco Wins Significant Orders for High Performance FPGA Platforms for Next Generation Airborne Radar System

Dec. 17, 2018

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., — Dec.12, 2018 Abaco today announced that the company has won significant orders from a major US prime contractor for its 3U Xilinx® Zynq® Ultrascale+™ MPSoC Processors with 1553 interface modules. They will be deployed over the next seven years within the central processing module of an advanced, next generation airborne radar system designed to deliver enhanced warfighter survivability.

Total value of the program to Abaco over its lifetime is expected to be up to $36 million.

The system uses an open architecture design to deliver flexibility in deployment and the potential to simply and cost-effectively upgrade in response to evolving threats.

“Situational awareness is one of the keys to maximizing personnel safety and security in the face of a broad array of ever-changing electronic warfare hazards, and requires the highest possible data bandwidth and processing performance,” said John Muller, Chief Growth Office at Abaco. “FPGA technology is a classic response: not only does it deliver the necessary throughput and bandwidth, but it also responds to the need to maximize flexibility, allowing the system to be rapidly and easily modified or enhanced as new requirements emerge.”

Abaco offers a broad range of FPGA processors and FMCs (FPGA mezzanine cards) including the VP869 6U VPX FPGA card and the 3U VPX VP889 high performance FPGA processing board.

The VP869 features two Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGAs and a Zynq 7000 Series multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC). It is designed for the most demanding mission critical applications where extreme FPGA processing and I/O bandwidth capabilities are needed. Typical applications include electronic warfare, radar/sonar processing, software defined radio, advanced digital beamforming, multi-channel digital receivers/transmitters and satellite communications systems.

Two industry standard (VITA 57) FMC+ sites are provided on the VP869 for high performance analog I/O, digital communications or video input.

A key feature of the VP869 is its extreme backplane bandwidth, with over 72 high speed serial lanes routed to the backplane delivering 594 Gbps of data throughput for advanced processing and offload applications. 24 bidirectional high speed serial lanes provide up to 300 Gbps of data bandwidth to and from the FMC+ I/O modules, enabling the utilization of the latest ADC and DAC technology for next generation wideband applications.

The VP889 high performance FPGA processing board features Xilinx’s latest Ultrascale+ device, together with Zynq Ultrascale+ technology for advanced security.

The VP889 is designed for the most demanding, mission critical military/defense applications. These include electronic warfare/ DRFM, radar/sonar processing, satellite communications systems, multi-channel digital transmission/reception and advanced digital beamforming.

Next generation signal processing systems require more bandwidth and more processing capability at lower power and smaller size. The VP889 helps customers meet these demanding requirements on an open COTS platform. With FMC+, customers have up to 300 Gbits/second digital serial bandwidth to and from modular I/O devices. The VP889’s combination of high performance processing and high density I/O delivers the flexibility to leverage Abaco’s market-leading FMC and FMC+ (VITA 57) product portfolio.

The VP889 can be populated with I/O capable of greater than 5 GSPS data rate or modules with up to 16 channels per card. The flexibility of FMC gives customers the ability to address several system parameters from wide-band low-latency to multi-channel coherent systems.

About Abaco Systems

With more than 30 years’ experience, Abaco Systems is a global leader in open architecture computing and electronic systems for aerospace, defense and industrial applications. We create innovative, modular solutions based on open standards that are characterized by outstanding price/performance, ultimate rugged reliability and minimal SWaP. Our goal is to be a significant contributor to our customers’ success, partnering with them to reduce cost, time-to-deployment and risk and supporting them over the long term.  With an active presence in hundreds of national asset platforms on land, sea and in the air, Abaco Systems is trusted where it matters most. www.abaco.com

For more information, contact:

Ian McMurray

Communications Manager

Abaco Systems

[email protected]

ARM is a registered trademark of ARM Limited. Xilinx and Zynq are registered trademarks, and Ultrascale+ is a trademark, of Xilinx, Inc. CompactPCI is a registered trademark of the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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