LEESBURG, Va., 24 July 2007. Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing in Leesburg, Va., is announcing a high-density 6U VPX Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) multilayer switch/router board designed for rugged embedded aerospace and defense applications.
The VPX6-684 II, available with 12, 20, or 24 GbE ports and as many as 4x10GbE ports, is ideal for system integrators architecting secure high performance IPv4/v6 intra-platform networks (IPNs). The board, which operates as a managed or an unmanaged switch/router, supports a 'defacto' industry standard CLI, the FireBlade II drastically speeds time to market by reducing set-up, configuration and maintenance times.
The VPX6-684 FireBlade II extends the design of its 6U VME predecessor, the SVME/DMV-682 FireBlade, which is being designed into land, air and sea platforms, with the rugged packaging of the VPX (VITA 46) board architecture. Additional features include support for routing up to 4x10GbE to the FireBlade's P1 connector, and support for copper interfaces to the backplane for all of the board's 12, 20 or 24 GbE ports. The Layer 2/3+ management and configuration software runs on the FireBlade's Freescale 8245 Power Architecture processor.
The FireBlade was designed to provide port flexibility. Four (4) of the board's GbE ports can be configured as optical (1000BaseSX). The first generations of the FireBlade will bring the optical ports out the front of the card with either pluggable connectors or with more rugged pig-tail connectors whose optical strands can easily be routed to the back of the card. Plans for future generations of the FireBlade include direct rear optical routing on VPX backplane using the P5 and/or P6 connector.
For more information contact Curtiss-Wright online at www.cwcembedded.com.
