You're In The Navy Now! Can AdvancedTCA Break The Ice In Military Applications?
By John Walrod, Assistant Vice President, SAIC Advanced Systems Division
As a network-centric platform with high availability and state-of-the-art performance, AdvancedTCA has been designed to change the way we plan, design, and build future military systems. In 2005, the first military system known to use AdvancedTCA® was installed and began operation. The system, located in the icy waters off the coast of Alaska, consists of a complex network of distributed sensors, data acquisition equipment, and computers. It provides advanced measurement capabilities that are essential to help keep Navy submarines safe and stealthy.
AdvancedTCA was selected for several reasons in the military system, including fault tolerance, superb Ethernet connectivity, detailed specification, and commercial availability of high-performance equipment. But perhaps the most important factor was that AdvancedTCA, and the related standard MicroTCA®, readily support a modern approach to system engineering using networked topologies. The architecture and topology support state-of-the-art system engineering, with network connections to every card, hierarchical modularity, point-of-load power conversion, and standard platform features to help achieve reliability.
Since 2005, AdvancedTCA has made slow progress among the more enlightened and less risk-adverse segments of defense electronics. In this business, the proper operation of complex electronic systems affects people's lives. A careful, well-considered migration to new standards and technologies is the wise approach. However, we are reaching the "tipping point" where the rate of adoption will determine whether the AdvancedTCA standard becomes prevalent in our industry or an also-ran.
The following example illustrates why xTCA platforms merit serious consideration for defense and aerospace systems. The Navy P-8A Multi-Mission Maritime Aircraft (MMA) is intended to tackle a wide variety of electronic missions, including surveillance, communications, intelligence, reconnaissance, training, patrol, target identification, and weapons use. The sensor suite includes optics, radar, RF, magnetics, and acoustics. The communications suite must support future network-centric operations with assured operation and state-of-the-art airborne wireless links. The xTCA standards provide an ideal platform for MMA because of their automated configuration management, 200 watts per slot of electronics cooling, modularity, side 2 shielding, high availability, high-speed networking, and high-performance processing blades. AdvancedTCA squarely addresses three issues that have commonly plagued systems such as MMA to date: poor configuration management, high cost of ownership, and inadequate platform cooling.
Other system examples to be presented at the 3rd Annual AdvancedTCA Summit include wideband data communications, tactical radio, antenna beamformers, and distributed instrumentation.
These examples show why AdvancedTCA is uniquely suited for future defense and aerospace systems, network-centric operations, and complex systems where reliability matters. However, several issues limit the adoption rate. First and foremost is simply lack of awareness. Most engineers and managers who are making system engineering decisions have never heard of AdvancedTCA, much less the tremendous advantages it offers. We must get the word out! A second issue that naturally follows is complexity and learning curve. We must make AdvancedTCA simple and straightforward to adopt!
Other market issues to be discussed at the 3rd Annual AdvancedTCA Summit will include technical limitations, early adopter cost, and competing standards.
John Walrod is assistant vice-president of the SAIC Advanced Systems Division. He is responsible for systems engineering and program management. He has developed and built networked systems for more than 20 years, has published more than 25 technical papers, and has lectured in the US and Europe on network-centric systems and sensor networks.
John Walrod is a keynote speaker at the third annual AdvancedTCA Summit, to be held October 16-18, 2007 at the Santa Clara Convention Center/Hyatt in Santa Clara, California. For more information, visit www.advancedtcasummit.com.