Engineers at Lockheed Martin Tactical Defense Systems of Goodyear, Ariz., needed a processor with high scalability to provide the airborne processing power for the Foliage Penetrating Radar Program (FOPEN). They found their answer with the multiprocessor SKYchannel system with 32 Excalibur processors from SKY Computers Inc. of Chelmsford, Mass.
The FOPEN is under development for the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency in Arlington, Va., for the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth, N.J., and at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.
"The selection of SKY Computers represents consensus between DARPA, CECOM, AFRL, and Lockheed Martin, to use SKYchannel as the base technology for the FOPEN program," says Greg Moore, FOPEN program manager at Lockheed Martin. "To gain this kind of broad support, SKY had to demonstrate hands down that the scaleability of their architecture and the interprocessor communications speed were superior to any other available or pending solutions."
The SKYchannel 320 megabyte-per- second, 64-bit packet bus is an ANSI standard for high-performance communication over the VME P2 connector. It provides links between daughtercards and motherboards, between boards, and between chassis for scaleable multiprocessing.
The Excalibur processor is based on the new Motorola PowerPC 740 microprocessor, the third generation of PowerPC processors. Each Excalibur includes four PowerPC 740 microprocessors and as many as 256 megabytes of dynamic random access memory. A single Excalibur on a 6U VME motherboard delivers 2 gigaflops of performance. - J.M.
For more information on SKYchannel and Sky Computers contact Diane Capps by phone at 978-250-1920, by mail at 27 Industrial Drive, Chelmsford, Mass., or on the World Wide Web at http:// www.sky.com.
