Posted by John McHale
SANTA BARBARA, Calif., 18 March 2010. Designers of avionics test equipment at GE Intelligent Platforms say they expect increased design-ins in 2010 especially devices with PCI Express technology.
"For avionics embedded and test and simulation applications, 2010 is bringing more opportunities for products with PCI express connections," Ben Daniel, business director Avionics Group, GE Intelligent Platforms in Santa Barbara, Calif. . "This is driving demand from PCI boards to PCIe boards, PCMCIA to ExpressCard, CPCI to VPX, and PMC to XMC.
"We have more and more customers asking about these new boards as they are doing their system trades. In avionics test and simulation applications the adoption curve is already ramping up and we have boards now at normal off the shelf product status. In rugged embedded avionics applications there is increasing demand, as there are more computing platforms with these interfaces, and we have rugged embedded XMC and VPX through the customers' system qualification phases and looking to rate production."
GE's latest product in this area is the RXMC-1553 high density MIL-STD 1553 XMC card. The device is RoHS-compliant, features either one or two dual-redundant channels, each of which is supported by 1 megabyte of memory, and is conductively cooled for deployment in harsh environments. A conformally-coated version is also available.
"The RXMC-1553 board family was designed explicitly around the need for low cost, rugged, embeddable 1553 interface cards, using the latest host slot interface technology. We took this opportunity to drive price out for rate adoption in embedded applications. We also retained the capability to configure the board to serve Simulation and Test applications; this now augments our new fully featured native PCIe form factor 1553 board family (RPCIE-1553), either of which work with our newly improved BusTools-1553 protocol analyzer family."
Standard features of the RXMC-1553 include 45-bit, microsecond message time tagging, triggers, extensive BC & RT link-list structures, error injection/detection, IRIG-B signal receiver/generator with GPS synchronization, automatic/manual RT status bit and mode code responses, along with advanced BC functionality. Avionics low and high side discrete channels, RS-485 differential discrete channels, or programmable I/O are factory configurable options.
