CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., 24 Aug 2009. A 3U VPX Gigabit Ethernet module and XMC card from GE Intelligent Platforms in Charlottesville, Va., will be installed in the vetronics of the U.S. Army M1A2 main battle tank as part of the U.S. Army heavy brigade combat team (HBCT) M1A2 Abrams Ethernet Switch Module (ESM).

GE will supply a custom version of its 3U VPX NETernity GBX410 Gigabit Ethernet switch and XMCXGO XMC card to General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) of Sterling Heights, Mich., maker of the M1A2 battle tank and the Abrams ESM tank electronics. Sales of these embedded systems for the M1A2 Abrams tank could reach $8.7 million over the next five years, GE officials say.

The GE NETernity GBX410 is a military IPv6-capable managed layer 2/3 Gigabit Ethernet switch in the 3U VPX form factor designed to meet demanding requirements for network centric operations. It features a non-blocking shared memory architecture that provides a 44 gigabit-per-second core and delivers wire speed performance with minimal latency to all ports simultaneously.

The switch is available in air- and conduction cooled formats. The XMCXGO mezzanine card provides additional dual 10 gigabit optical ports to dramatically increase total throughput and overall system flexibility.

"GDLS recognized that the VPX architecture could uniquely deliver against their requirement for very high speed processing," says Rob McKeel, vice president of embedded systems at GE Intelligent Platforms.

The GBX410 has management capabilities that include VLANs, Link Aggregation, Spanning Tree, IPv4 and IPv6, traffic policing, QoS, guaranteed bandwidth and SNMP support. This switch can be expanded to a 24-port non-blocking solution by connecting two GBX410 together via the integral 10 Gb uplink port.

For more information contact GE Intelligent Platforms online at www.gefanuc.com.