Engineers at the Flexible Test Measurement System (FTMS) group at Northrop Grumman Electronic Sensors and Systems in Baltimore needed a modular computer system for a jet engine test cell upgrade program. The VXI products from KineticSystems in Lockport, Ill., met their needs.
Kinetic`s VXI products that Northrop Grumman specialists use in the application are: V195 mainframe; 2961 host interface; V160 GI slot-0 controller; V266 16-bit DAC; V350 digital output; V630 frequency counter; V208 ADC; and V243 multiplexed signal conditioning module.
Kinetic VXI products feature a large number of channels, as well as measurement and throughput accuracy, says Mike Zayac, program manager at Northrop Grumman. "A key selling point was their willingness to adopt the product to the customer`s application," Zayac says.
The Kinetic system uses the VXI open standard for instrumentation, has more than 1,500 channels, and is capable of presenting new data value to the host within two milliseconds after it is collected, claim Kinetic officials. The analog channels achieve an accuracy of 3 volts.
The system uses a reflective memory link between the host computer`s I/O backplane and the host interface VXI. An embedded Intel Pentium controller handles setup, configuration, and status to emulate the data format of the existing system, thereby providing a drop-in replacement.
Kinetic`s fiber-optic grand interconnect acts as a direct-memory-access engine that moves data from the I/O modules. - J.M.
For more information on the Kinetic-Systems VXI products contact Kinetic by phone at 815-838-0005, by fax at 815-838-4424, by mail at KineticSystems, 900 N. State Street, Lockport, Ill., 60441-2200, by e-mail at [email protected], or on the World Wide Web at http:// www.kscorp.com. Sensors
