Avionics: Rugged PMC combines ARINC 429 and serial communications

Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing (CWCEC) in Leesburg, Va., is offering a rugged avionics communications controller PMC card that combines 4 channels of ARINC 429 (four transmit & eight receive) and four serial channels on one card. The P429A ARINC 429 communications controller is for VME and CompactPCI embedded systems. The P429A has two onboard ARINC 429 controllers, each with dual ARINC 429 transceivers. The card provides four transmitter channels (with 128-byte, 32-word transmit FIFOs) and eight receiver channels (with 128-byte, 32-word receive FIFOs). Four RS-485/RS-422 serial communications channels (115.2-kilobits-per-second asynch/4-megabits-per-second synch) are also supported. On-board memory includes 64 kilobytes of dual port RAM for serial communication DMA data buffering for the RS-485 transmit and receive channels. Eight megabytes of Flash memory is also on-board. All I/O is via the card’s backplane. For more information contact Curtiss-Wright online at www.cwcembedded.com.