Engineers at the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Systems Center in San Diego needed an Intel Pentium-based VME single-board computer for a shipboard- and land-based satellite communications system. They found their solution in the GMS V155 Colt single-slot Pentium board from General Micro Systems in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.
Navy designers are using the GMS Colt board as a single-slot Windows NT workstation for the Navy EHF Communications Controller (NECC), which goes to surface ships and land stations, says Alan Hermansen the NECC program manager.
Navy officials are switching from the Unix operating system to Windows NT in many applications so they can take advantage of the rich choices of software tools available for NT, as well as less expensive hardware than is available to run Unix, Hermansen says.
The NECC has strong demands for I/O capability, which is one of the primary reasons Navy designers went to General Micro for the single-board computer.
"We chose the board because it allows us to put on two PMC modules, and it could handle dual Pentiums [of 200 MHz]," Hermansen says "We haven`t looked into the Pentium II yet, but we are planning on doing that in the future." Another attraction of the Colt board is its ability to take as much on-board memory as 256 megabytes, Hermansen says.
The PMC modules - also known as PCI mezzanine cards - also come from General Micro, although they are custom-designed for the NECC and are not commercial off-the-shelf products, Hermansen says.
"We started out buying commercially available PMCs," Hermansen says, but General Micro engineers offered in a custom design precisely what Navy designers needed - a quad-serial PMC with four RS 422 channels, and a dual-ethernet PMC. - J.K.
For more information on the General Micro Colt single-board computer, contact Ben Sharfi of General Micro Systems by phone at 909-980-4863, by fax at 909-987-4863, by e-mail at ben@gms4vme, or by post at 8358 Maple Place, P.O. Box 3689, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., 91730.
U.S. Navy officials are using the Pentium-based Colt single-board computer (pictures above) from General Micro Systems. The board will be a single-slot Windows NT workstation for shipboard and satellite communications systems.
