By John Long
Communication is critical to today’s military and aerospace industry. The need to communicate actionable information quickly between the command center, troops in the field, unmanned vehicles, and other military assets is giving rise to network-centric warfare. So not surprisingly, today’s mil-aero networks are beginning to look a lot like today’s telecom networks–reliable where intelligent endpoints share real-time information over high bandwidth.
For example, video streams captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are sent back to the command center for advanced image processing to track the movements of military targets. The command center also controls several UAVs, performs telemetry, factors in GPS data, and ultimately processes vast amounts of data simultaneously. In the past, information sharing was limited because communication was mostly localized, as in the case of tanks lacking reliable data links to command centers.
Today, military responsibilities ranging from humanitarian, police, and combat operations makes it imperative to process and distribute data around the globe. To support these diverse missions, military and aerospace equipment is pushing the performance envelope with applications like ground control stations and aerospace surveillance. In addition, escalating industry requirements are driving the shift to using standards-based commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions, which deliver the latest computing and networking technologies with reduced development time and cost.
 VPX and ATCA embedded computing increasingly will be integrated into solutions such as the military communications system shown above. |
No matter the COTS computing technology, year after year designers must find ways to increase performance. Helping this cause, the latest multicore processors are boosting performance while curbing power consumption. Still, there are limits to the number and types of processors any board form factor can accommodate. Thus, computing technologies that support the largest board size and cooling capacity have a decided edge in achieving the highest level of performance. There are several COTS technologies that are applicable in the mil-aero industry, yet there are two currently available COTS computing technologies–VPX (VITA 46) and ATCA (Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture)–that are viable options to meet these new mil-aero requirements.
COTS solutions
In the past 10 years, COTS solutions have moved from hypothetical to accepted options for aerospace and defense applications. COTS technologies offer long life cycles, reliability, and ruggedness, and have demonstrated longevity, which is key to risk adverse mil-aero systems integrators. In addition, COTS technologies reduce time-to-market and resource requirements.
Along with the well-established VME and CompactPCI (cPCI) standards, other COTS technologies, such as ATCA, MicroTCA, and PCI, are gaining ground in the mil-aero industry.
The traditional markets for COTS solutions are mission computing applications, including control/mission controllers, unmanned vehicles, and avionics. These applications are served mostly by VME, CompactPCI, and VPX. Today, network-centric operations have created new opportunities in mobile and high-performance equipment that require a high level of interoperability. COTS solutions are expected to make significant headway into these two new segments.
Providing technologies for networked equipment in the battlefield, COM Express and PC/104 have strong potential to expand into mobile and small devices, like unmanned ground and aerial vehicles (UGV/AVG). ATCA, MicroTCA, and VPX are COTS contenders for next-generation, high-performance computing systems such as ground control stations, naval, and C4ISR. High performance is an emerging market created to serve the network-centric military model.
Key requirements by market segment
As the military moves to a network-centric doctrine, the majority of devices and systems require a higher level of robustness than their enterprise and business counterparts. For example, systems used for mobile mission computing or high-performance applications must meet stringent requirements for environmental durability such as shock, vibration, and extended temperature.
Many COTS technologies were designed to withstand the rigors of military environments, while offering developers readily available, interoperable hardware that reduces design effort. Going beyond environmental specs, there are different categories of systems with relatively unique requirements, such as small form factor and portability, reliable wireless radio technology, and low power consumption to extend battery life mobile and small applications like UAVs; mid-range compute performance, light weight to lighten the load for ships and aircraft, and low power consumption to reduce heat and minimize impact on power sources in mission computing; and high compute performance and large storage capacity, high bandwidth, low latency backplane switching to share data across several boards, advanced graphical interfaces to display complex images, and application-specific I/O requirements in large systems such as ground-control stations.
Housing high-performance processors
Military and aerospace systems designers who are in the process of replacing proprietary architectures are looking for COTS technologies that accommodate high-performance multicore processors. Integrating a high level of computing power basically comes down to board size, board power consumption, and backplane technology. In all these areas, ATCA has a significant advantage over VPX.
An ATCA board area is 2.7 times the size of VPX, which affords developers more area for processors, chipsets, memory, and graphics processor units (GPUs), thereby enabling a more powerful design. Likewise, ATCA has more than 1.7 times the thermal budget of VPX, allowing vendors to integrate higher performance components. High-performance systems, which require fast inter-board communications, also get ample bandwidth from ATCA with 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet, 10 times faster than what VPX currently supports.
Translating board size into performance
The large board size and power consumption per slot specified by ATCA allows vendors to design boards with more powerful processors than VPX boards, where a typical VPX board is equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 (two cores), and a RadiSys ATCA board integrates an Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series (four cores). The Intel Xeon processor on the ATCA board has 1.9 times the integer performance and 2.2 times the floating-point performance of the processor on the VPX board. The significantly larger ATCA board size has the potential to deliver approximately twice the performance of a VPX board.
Addressing the storage requirements of high-performance systems, ATCA supports iSCSI and JBOD, whereas VPX has limited in-chassis solutions for high-density storage. Quality graphics, which are crucial for ground control systems, are also supported by several ATCA vendors offering high-resolution video; however, graphics solutions for VPX are currently limited.
Broad ecosystem support
ATCA also benefits from a large COTS ecosystem of vendors, comprising more than 45 suppliers with more than five years of deployment experience and widespread adoption by customers and equipment vendors. High-performance components are already available, having been tested at industry plug fests to ensure interoperability. RadiSys, an ATCA systems provider with more field-deployed ATCA systems than any other vendor, has designed products that are ruggedized above and beyond industry standards, tested for extreme temperatures, and integrated with ruggedized platforms.
Today, VPX is supported by a limited number of vendors, and interoperability issues are still being worked out. The emergence of the OpenVPX Industry Working Group formed to address VPX system interoperability is creating some confusion for VPX suppliers and customers, and generating new questions about backplane interoperability between board-level vendors.
When performance counts
Military and aerospace system designers are turning to standards-based technologies that offer lower cost, wide availability, and integration of the latest technologies. Also important, COTS technologies have made tremendous progress in satisfying the size, ruggedness, and performance requirements for a wide range of mil-aero applications. As the military switches to network-centric operations, COTS technologies will deliver computing performance for applications such as ground control stations. Today, equipment manufacturers are carefully evaluating ATCA, MicroTCA, and VPX for this emerging COTS market.
When performance matters, the ATCA board form factor offers nearly double the computing power and 10 times the backplane switching bandwidth of comparable VPX-based boards. Today, ATCA systems are shipping in volume to telecom operators, while VPX is still overcoming interoperability issues. ATCA vendors, such as RadiSys, have a proven track record for delivering high-performance, high-reliability equipment, and military equipment vendors can count on ATCA for mission-critical computing.
John Long is a product line manager at RadiSys Corp. in Hillsboro, Ore., who focuses on ATCA single-board computers and storage. He has more than 10 years experience in the communication industry in marketing, sales, and operational positions with Intel, Dialogic, and AT&T. He has an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.