When U.S. Air Force program managers faced upgrading the display generator for the cockpits of their F-16 jet fighters to match the mounting information input, they also faced the daunting task of building and debugging prototype hardware via a costly iterative process.
Instead, Air Force officials used a virtual prototyping approach from CPU Technologies Inc. of Pleasanton, Calif. - known as SystemLab - to simulate the aircraft`s 1750 processor and select the necessary hardware.
The solution was the addition of a MIPS 32-bit RISC chip to the 1750 board that not only did the immediate job - while still using existing code - but also held promise for a COTS-compatible open system architecture applicable to other onboard processor tasks, says Gail Walters, executive vice president at CPU.
The work was completed at the end of November under a subcontract from Sanders, a Lockheed Martin Co. in Nashua, N.H., and CPU officials then began investigating how this architecture could extend to achieve commonality between the Air Force`s 1750 and the Navy`s AYK-14 as part of a joint program known as the Advanced Avionics Processor (AAP). - J.R.
For more information on CPU Technologies, phone 510-224-9920, or fax 510-227-0539.
