Abaco Wins Significant Orders to Equip New Sensor Processing/Electronic Countermeasures Airborne Subsystem

HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—May 21 2019  Abaco Systems today announced that it had won significant orders from a major prime contractor to provide FPGA processor subsystems which will be at the heart of a C4ISR modernization/upgrade program. The new sensor processing/electronic countermeasures (ECM) solution will be deployed across multiple airborne platforms by the US Air Force. 

The value of the program to Abaco over the coming five years is expected to be around $8 million, with hundreds of systems required.

The orders are for subsystems comprising Abaco’s rugged VP881 FPGA processing board, together with FMC216 and FMC116 FMCs, making a complete, single-source solution.    

Such is the high degree of integration and functional density of the VP881, the customer was able to replace multiple boards in a prior implementation of the system with a single board, helping to reduce a legacy 12-slot 6U VPX system to a 6-slot 3U VPX system – substantially improving the system’s SWaP (size, weight and power) profile. The customer also took advantage of the optional Firefly™ upgrade to enable even greater throughput.

“In advanced electronic warfare applications, FPGA technology provides the flexibility to rapidly implement responses to emerging threats,” said John Muller, Chief Growth Officer, Abaco Systems. “The solution we proposed reflects that need for straightforward reconfigurability, as well as the customer’s requirement for high bandwidth and advanced processing capability - on an open COTS platform.”

The 3U VPX VP881 is a high-performance FPGA processing board featuring Xilinx® Ultrascale™ and Zynq® Ultrascale+™ technology. It is designed for the most demanding, mission critical military/defense applications such as electronic warfare/ DRFM, radar/sonar image processing, satellite communications systems, multichannel digital transmission/reception and advanced digital beamforming. With seven Ultrascale FPGAs to choose from, as well as a migration path to a range of Virtex™ Ultrascale+ devices, the VP881 brings high performance, flexibility, and longevity to the 3U VPX form factor.

The FMC216 16-channel DAC FMC (FPGA Mezzanine Card) and FMC116 16-channel ADC FMC daughter cards are fully compliant with the VITA 57.1-2008 standard. The FMC216 provides 16 16-Bit D/A channels with sample rates up to 312.5Msps; the FMC116 delivers 16-channel 14-bit A/D conversion at 125 Msps.

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]

Xilinx and Zynq are registered trademarks, and Ultrascale and Ultrascale+ are trademarks, of Xilinx, Inc. FireFly is a trademark of Samtec, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.