When it comes to rugged Single Board Computers, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing’s record of achievement is unmatched. The depth of experience gained through the development of successive generations of PowerPC and Intel-based products has resulted in a worldwide installed base approaching 100,000 units deployed in such broadly diverse applications as torpedo guidance, sensor control, fire control, mission computing and graphical display consoles. Curtiss-Wright’s off-the-shelf SBC products are available in 3U and 6U formats offering VMEbus, VPX/VPX-REDI or CompactPCI compatibility, meeting a broad spectrum of environmental requirements using convection or conduction cooling techniques for thermal management. In addition to the off-the-shelf products, many applications have been satisfied by customer-specific derivatives of our standard products repackaged into different form-factors along with slightly modified or custom functionality to meet specific project end-use requirements.

An SBC is at the heart of every embedded subsystem used in military applications. That’s why we offer such a range of choices: single- and dual-core Freescale PPC 8641 Platform processor, the single and dual Freescale PowerPC 7447/7448 and IBM PowerPC 750FX processors and many others. Complementing the range of processor types is a choice of backplane bus architectures and environmental standards designed to perform in the complete spectrum of rugged deployed applications. SBCs are offered with a choice of convection or conduction cooling and the range of module sizes encompasses 6U VMEbus products, 3U CompactPCI products for use in confined spaces, plus state-of-the-art 3U and 6U VPX (VITA 46) products where the highest performance, scalable fabric-based architectures are required. What characterizes our SBCs is their industry-leading performance per Watt, complemented by a wealth of I/O and an array of additional PMC/XMC mezzanine modules, often enabling an entire subsystem’s I/O requirements to fit just the SBC itself.

All our SBC products are designed to offer the highest levels of performance and functionality making use of the latest technology proven to meet our exacting standards for operation in harsh environments and extremes of temperature. Beyond out capable hardware, it is the excellence of our software that unleashes the true potential of each product, reducing risk and cutting time-to-deployment. We write and support BSPs for the leading real-time operating systems; Wind River’s VxWorks® with Tornado and Workbench IDEs, Windows XP,™ Windows XP Embedded, GreenHills Software’s Integrity and Linux. We offer many hundreds of enhanced functions in addition to the included drivers for the industry-standard interface devices used on our products. Support is provided for dual-processors, watchdog timers, temperature sensors, digital I/O, Flash File systems, Gigabit Ethernet, MIL-STD-1553B, DSP function libraries for the AltiVec vector processor plus our innovative Inter-Processor Communications (IPC) software. IPC provides the functionality to communicate between processors on a single card or between multiple processors through a fabric, abstracting the application from the details of the hardware implementation or its physical locations.

COTS Continuum is an architecture encompassing hardware, software and mechanical standards that will remain consistent across future Curtiss-Wright products. Fully compliant with existing ANSI and VITA open-system standards, Continuum includes mapping of I/O pinout by functional types plus common interfaces to device drivers and inter-processor communications. Continuum supports portability of software and project infrastructure from product to product providing a broad ranging platform for through-life project management, designed to protect our customers’ long-term investment by spanning many future generations of Curtiss-Wright products.

Forming part of Curtiss-Wright’s COTS Continuum initiative, CSA offers a cohesive set of functions and APIs common to new SBC and advanced multi-computing products. It provides empowered software with a rich set of features and a consistent user interface to on-board debug and development Flash and PCI interfaces and Curtiss-Wright’s multi-level Builtin-Test (BIT) software. CSA’s common interface significantly reduces familiarization and learning time when migrating from generation to generation, speeding the overall development process.

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A cornerstone of Curtiss-Wright’s product strategy is to support the use of backplane I/O for all deployable implementations. Backplane I/O is more space-efficient, more resilient in severe environments and less likely to be misconnected during maintenance compared to front panel I/O. These benefits also extend to PMC modules with their I/O being routed through the host SBC or carrier card to the backplane. Many SBCs incorporate matched-impedance signal traces for compatibility with high speed interfaces such as Fibre Channel, digital video and StarFabric.

Curtiss-Wright is a leading industry participant in the continuous evolution of the VMEbus for military applications under the banner of the VITA/VSO organization. The most significant new standards to be announced are VPX and VPX-REDI (VITA 46 and VITA 48), adding high speed backplane connectivity to the current form-factor using connectors that support data rates up to 6.25Gbaud.

Occupying the same slot width and thermal interface dimensions as existing conduction-cooled VME modules, VPX products can be used in current chassis with new backplanes to provide a practical and affordable upgrade for existing VME implementations. VPX-REDI products are designed as Line Replaceable Modules (LRM) where the chassis is an integral part of a vehicle or aircraft. VPX and VPX-REDI unlock the potential of new switched fabric technologies such as PCI-Express and Serial RapidIO (SRIO) by introducing backplane connectivity for future generations of board-to-board and box-to-box switched fabrics. The VPX6-185 is the industry’s first SBC designed specifically for VPX and VPX-REDI based on the Freescale 8641 Platform processor with AltiVec.