Military & Aerospace Electronics

18 JANUARY 2017 MILITARY & AEROSPACE ELECTRONICS www.militaryaerospace.com much more performance or capability, along with the consolidation of several systems into one system or one box — all with a smaller overall footprint and at the same or less cost,” Ciufo continues.

An example Ciufo gives is combining a weapons system computer with the mission planning console such that the operator’s control console displays targets and friendly forces on a moving map. That same computer also calculates the fire control solution and/or aims a weapons array or computes the most efficient travel route while sending all that data up or down the chain of command on a secured, tactical local area network (LAN) or satellite communications (SATCOM), he says.

General Micro Systems engineers
married the latest COTS technolo-
gy with the DOD’s expectation for
smaller, better, faster, and cheap-
er for the U.S. Army’s Warfighter In-
formation Network-Tactical (WIN-T)
program. “WIN-T is the Army’s tac-
tical Internet, and the Increment 2
upgrade provides data-on-the-move
capability,” Ciufo explains. “That is,
the processing and SATCOM mo-
dems and line-of-sight, radio-fre-
quency (RF) networks no longer force
the connected vehicles and assets to
stop to transmit/receive.

“This on-the-move capability is
a huge upgrade that required lots
more processing performance. You’d
expect that this would also require
more equipment or bigger equip-
ment,” Ciufo adds. “Yet, the Army
and General Dynamics, the prime
contractor for WIN-T, came to GMS
and we leaped over ‘incremental
COTS upgrades’ and instead recom-
mended Intel’s new Xeon D 12-core
server CPU. Collectively, we created
the SB2002-SW ‘Blackhawk’ Xeon D
virtual machine processor/network
switch that replaced up to five sepa-
rate boxes in a WIN-T installation.”
The project leveraged GMS and
other technologies “to provide the
warfighter with ‘much more’ at a
price and size that was actually
less than previous systems,” Ciufo
says. “The resulting improvement
was a boon to the Army, and Gen-
eral Dynamics was praised for re-
moving equipment from Increment

1 (predecessor) vehicles while low-
ering cost. In the Army’s Stryker ve-
hicle, for example, two crew seats
could be re-installed as extra space
was freed up with fewer and small-
er GMS boxes.”
Military programs, such as WIN-T,
that were slowed down due to bud-
get cuts will see renewed funding,
Ciufo predicts. With more power-
ful processors from ARM, Qualcomm
(NXP/Freescale), and Intel, he also
expects “more emphasis on sensor
fusion, machine vision, and process-
ing at the tip of the spear; i.e., more
digital signal processing (DSP) and
image processing on the actual plat-
form instead of recording data, re-
turning to base, and processing that
data using rack-mount servers.”
At the same time, Ciufo explains,
Intel is adding (Altera) field-pro-
grammable gate arrays (FPGAs) to its
Xeon server processors and poten-
tially some of its higher-end Core i7
CPUs, which promises to bring even
more performance in smaller pack-
ages. “This bodes extremely well
for GMS as our whole value propo-
sition is loads of performance and
I/O in the smallest, lightest pack-
age possible.”

FPGAs and multi-core computing
The use of high-powered FPGAs
in RF rugged systems is a growing
mil-aero trend, as is high-core-count
processing using virtual machines
(VM), says Jason Shields, product
manager of 3U VPX solutions at Cur-
tiss-Wright Defense Solutions in San
Diego. “These are typically ‘head-
less’ systems that have no video
output and are used as embedded
servers or as a general-purpose pro-
cessing box.”
Curtiss-Wright’s CHAMP-XDx
family of DSP processor modules,
based on the Intel Xeon D, address-
es these applications, Shields says.
“When integrated with one of our
MPMC system enclosures, we are
able to satisfy the demand for more
General Micro Systems’ RuggedView smart
displays include robust embedded computers.