Engineers at FlightSafety International of Broken Arrow, Okla., needed to increase flexibility and modularity, while reducing costs in their flight simulator. To solve the problem, they chose the IndustryPack fiber optic interface mezzanine modules from Greenspring Computers in Menlo Park, Calif.
"We replaced nine miles of wiring" with just more than 600 feet of GreenSpring`s fiber optics, says Jim Wood a senior design engineer in the SSD at FlightSafety. "We were able to reduce our materials cost by 20 percent."
The system is a reflective memory architecture and uses a fiber optic star typology that employs a VME chassis linked to intelligent remote units via a 1.06 GHz fiber link.
Reflective memory means that each processor has a block of memory that can be used like any other RAM with its contents duplicated in exactly every other processor`s reflective memory, says Kim Rubin, chief technical officer at GreenSpring Computers.
The interface is uniform and symmetric between all nodes, and there are no drivers to write, he adds. "There is no protocol or software latency. The hardware does everything." - J.M.
For more information on the GreenSpring IndustryPack, phone GreenSpring at 415-327-1200, or fax at 415-327-3808 or visit their Web site at http://www.greenspring.com.
