have a chip-scale atomic clock to assure precision timing, rather than from a GPS device. It’s connected to
an Ethernet switch to distribute all this PNT data. The
Army and the other services view this as one way to
deal with GPS degradation and GPS denial. Assured
PNT is validating the truth of where you are and where
you’re going.”
Data storage and
memory
There are additional components of
unmanned sensor processing. One overriding technology is fast
data storage.
“The mission of a
UAV is to collect infor-
mation the battlefield.
Storing the information is hugely important,” says GMS’s Ciufo.
“When we went from
rotating media to solid-state drives,
things got a lot better.”
Solid-state drives fixed a lot of the
problems of rotating data storage —
especially when it comes to ruggediza-
tion, reliability, and size. It does have a
downside: “It’s more expensive for the
density you get,” Ciufo says.
Yet data storage continues to improve,
and is enabling data storage to be a big
contributor of unmanned sensor processing capabilities. One of the most
significant advances is Non-Volatile
Memory Express (NVMe), which enables
systems designers to access non-volatile storage media like the Flash memory in solid-state
memory devices via the PCI Express bus. NVMe enables
host hardware and software to use parallelism in modern solid-state drives.
NVMe “eliminates the need for a hard disk controller
and avoids the latency of accessing the drive directly,”
Ciufo explains. “The processor can talk directly to the
drive, and boosts the performance of streaming data
to the drive.”
Other advantages of NVMe include its ability to be
ruggedized for applications like unmanned vehicles,
as well as its ability to carry out fast data encryption
and decryption. “You can buy NVMe drives that do
multi-encryption on the fly, and we are doing that as
well,” Ciufo says.
Mercury Systems engineers are addressing SWaP in
on-board data storage with
a 3D stacking technique for
flash memory in solid-state
memory devices. On-board
sensor processing “relies on
vast amounts of memory, and
memory takes up space,” says
Mercury’s Bratton.
“On the Xeon boards, we are
doing dense memory stacks
and reducing the footprint the
memory takes on the board by
about 90 percent,” Bratton says.
“We connect the memory to the
board with BGA packaging. It is
very dense and rugged memory
attached to the board.”
Another benefit to Mercury’s
rugged on-board, solid-state
memory in its high-performance Xeon embedded computing boards is the technology’s intense level of
ruggedization. “We have experience in smart munitions,”
Bratton explains. “We can make
these stacked chips gun-hard-ened, and we can leverage this
technology to make these payloads quite small.”
Power and thermal management
Dense, powerful computing sized small enough for
on-board unmanned sensor-processing payloads can
have two substantial drawbacks: substantial power
requirements, and difficulty to cool. Hence, power and
thermal management on unmanned sensor-processing payloads need to be considered up-front in any
system design.
Mercury Systems uses special hardening
to ruggedize high-performance embedded
computing sufficiently for use in unmanned
vehicle sensor-processing subsystems.
The S2002-MD Golden-Eyes II from General Micro Systems offers
two isolated rugged servers based on the Intel Xeon-D and
removable data storage drives for unmanned vehicles and other
small-form-factor applications.
