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data streaming in — terabytes —
in real time.”
Not only are today’s most modern
processors powerful, but increas-
ingly they are easier to integrate
than previous generations.
“You have the silicon that is much
more powerful, and much more user-
friendly in terms of programming,”
says Aitech’s Patterson. “The imple-
mentation process is almost limitless
with the amount of processing that
the systems designer has available.”
Trends in the miniaturization of
processors of many different types
has progressed to the stage where
they can power shoebox-size, sen-
sor-processing subsystems appro-
priate for many small- and medi-
um-sized unmanned vehicles. This
trend applies to general-purpose cen-
tral processing units (CPUs), gener-
al-purpose graphics-processing units
(GPGPUs), vector-processing engines,
field-programmable gate arrays
(FPGAs), and other components criti-
cal to on-board sensor processing.
“Intel, obviously, is a large component of that, but there are other
architectures, like ARM, that are
growing significantly within military unmanned vehicles,” says Mike
Southworth, product manager at
the Curtiss-Wright Corp. Defense
Solutions Division in Ashburn, Va.
He also cites GPGPUs from Nvidia
Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif., as a
popular on-board data processor for
unmanned systems.
“Intel has released its first sys-
tem-on-a-chip for the Xeon pro-
cessor technology that has enabled
power consumption like the com-
pany’s Core i7 processor, but with
more cores — 16 for commer-
cial-temperature applications, and
12 cores for industrial tempera-
tures — with 45 watts of thermal
dissipation,” Southworth says. “The
Intel Xeon D brings together a lot
of processing cores, much more
memory, and on top of that many
more PCI Express and 10 Gigabit
Ethernet lanes.”
