Will Help Equip Fighter Aircraft With Next Generation Radar

Abaco has won substantial orders from a leading systems integrator that sees Abaco's 3U VPX single board computers, FPGA cards and FPGA mezzanine cards deployed as part of a major radar systems upgrade for two classes of jet fighter for the USAF. The program will likely be extended to include upgrades for aircraft operated by the US Navy and by armed forces in Europe. The order was won in competition against several other potential vendors.

Total value of the program to Abaco over its 3-year lifetime is expected to be in excess of $4 million.

The Abaco solution leverages the capabilities of the SBC347D 3U VPX single board computer to provide the processing capability at the heart of an active electronic scanned array radar, assimilating and communicating data for presentation to the cockpit for analysis and action. Abaco's VP780 FPGA card and FMC160 mezzanine card allow the application to complete operational airborne sky sweeps (scanning) with the results passed to the SBC347D.

"The customer's selection criteria were that the proposed solution must be capable of maintaining high performance even at high temperatures; must demonstrate proven rugged reliability; and must be available on short lead times," said John Muller, Chief Growth Officer, Abaco Systems. "We were able to demonstrate to the customer the superiority of our solution in all respects – not least in the SBC347D's unique cooling architecture, giving it the ability to perform at 100% of its rated speed even at temperatures as high as 75°C."

"We worked closely with the customer from initial concept development, supported him with development hardware and software and extensive technical assistance and partnered on the creation of the winning proposal," Muller continued.

The SBC347D rugged 3U VPX single board computer features the Intel Xeon Processor D-1500 Family, using versions of the processor that offer support for up to 16 cores. It features up to 32GBytes of DDR4 ECC memory, operating at up to 2.0 MHZ, enabling superior memory performance; 32 GBytes NAND Flash (SSD), 32 MBytes BIOS Flash and 16 MBytes BIOS backup Flash memory are also provided.

Of particular note is the provision made by the SBC347D to enable customers to implement their security and information assurance strategies. This is achieved via a secure FPGA solution that offers inherent reliability and security features such as protection against differential power analysis (DPA) attacks and against single event upsets (SEU) as well as a range of tamper detect, encryption and zeroization features which can be implemented by the user.

The VP780 is a high performance Xilinx Virtex-7 3U VPX card with advanced digital signal processing capabilities. The design has been optimized for the implementation of complex FPGA algorithms with high throughput requirements. A VITA 57 compliant FMC site makes it possible to easily integrate I/O cards with A/D, D/A, RF capabilities and more. Optionally conduction cooled, the VP780 supports up to 10GBytes of DDR3 SDRAM and additional memory options on 2 BLAST sites.

The FMC160 provides one 12-bit A/D channel at 3.6Gsps and one 14-bit D/A channel at 5.7Gsps (2.85Gsps direct RF synthesis) clocked by either an internal clock source (optionally locked to an external reference) or an externally supplied sample clock. In addition, a trigger input for customized sampling control is available to users. The FMC160 daughter card is mechanically and electrically compliant with the FMC standard (ANSI/VITA 57.1).

(Source: Abaco news release)

FMI: www.abaco.com