Engineers at General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) in Sterling Heights, Mich., sought compact embedded computing components for the U.S. Army M1A2 main battle tank. They found the required electronics at GE Intelligent Platforms in Charlottesville, Va.
General Dynamics engineers integrated a 3U VPX Gigabit Ethernet module and XMC card from GE Intelligent Platforms into the vetronics of the M1A2 main battle tank. The components are part of the U.S. Army heavy brigade combat team (HBCT) M1A2 Abrams Ethernet switch module (ESM).
Engineers at GE Intelligent Platforms supplied a custom version of the company’s 3U VPX NETernity GBX410 Gigabit Ethernet switch and XMCXGO XMC card to GDLS. Sales of these embedded systems for the M1A2 Abrams tank could reach $8.7 million over the next five years, GE Intelligent Platforms officials say.
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GE Intelligent Platforms’ 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. The device features a non-blocking shared memory architecture that provides a 44 gigabit-per-second core. It delivers wire speed performance with minimal latency to all ports simultaneously, according to a company representative.
The switch is available in both air- and conduction-cooled formats. The XMCXGO mezzanine card provides additional dual 10 Gigabit optical ports to 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’s management capabilities include VLANs (virtual LANs), link aggregation, spanning tree, IPv4 and IPv6, traffic policing, QoS (quality of service), guaranteed bandwidth, and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) support. The switch can be expanded to a 24-port, non-blocking solution by connecting two GBX410 together via the integral 10 Gigabit uplink port.
For more information, visit GE Intelligent Platforms online at www.ge-ip.com.
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