Partners collaborate to produce VPX system for electronic warfare
SOSA (Sensor Open System Architecture) Consortium members Pentek, Herrick Technology Laboratories and Kontron have developed products aligned with the SOSA Technical Standard used in a 3U VPX demonstrator system. The 3U VPX system is suitable for electronic warfare (EW), SIGINT, radar and communications applications. The flight-qualified chassis uses open architecture modules, from multiple suppliers.
Herrick Technology Laboratories integrated the Kontron VX305C-40G SOSA-aligned single board computer (SBC) with a Model 71813 XMC board from Pentek which provides customisable I/O signal status and control for their new SOSA C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) demonstrator system for the US army.
The C4ISR demonstrator system, in an HTLv-C-19 chassis, with 16 payload slots and three power supply slots, includes two slots with Kontron VX305C-40G SBC and Pentek Model 71813 digital I/O XMC modules.
The Kontron VX305C-40G 3U VPX SBC using a 12-core Intel Xeon D processor, with 40 Gigabit Ethernet Data Plane (40GBASE-KR4), a four-lane PCI Express 3.0 expansion plane, dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet Control Plane (10GBASE-KR) and user I/O including SAT III, USB (2 and 3), serial links, video (HDMI, with DisplayPort available in 2019), GPIO, and an XMC site with backplane user mapping.
The Pentek Model 71813 is based on the Xilinx Kintex Ultrascale FPGA and features 28 pairs of LVDS digital I/O to meet the requirements of emerging standards from The Open Group SOSA Consortium of which Pentek is a member.
The demonstrator also has eight RF/payload slots with multiple HTLv-1 and HTLv-2 dual and quad channel HF/VHF/UHF transceiver modules, one slot with an HTL PNTRv (Precision Navigation and Timing Reference) module providing a radial clock with position, navigation and timing, two slots with 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet switches, two slots with PCIe Gen 4 and 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and three power supply slots providing 100+W of power per slot.
The system level interfaces are also aligned with the SOSA Technical Standard to maximise the chassis level interoperability. The backplane is designed to support 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) Data Plane, PCIe-Gen 4 Expansion Plane and 10 GigE Control Plane. The HTLv-C-19 chassis uses the SOSA-aligned front panel I/O connector definitions. It is also designed to the VITA 48.2 VPX REDI conduction cooling standard for rugged environments.
The Herrick Technology Laboratories HTLv-1 and HTLv-2 are 3U OpenVPX quad and dual channel HF/VHF/UHF software defined radio transceiver modules designed to support various missions. The PNTRv is also a 3U VPX module that provides position, navigation and timing information to the chassis via GPS and chipscale atomic clock.
