Abaco to Provide Radar Systems Upgrade for Two Classes of USAF Jet Fighters

Abaco Systems, a United States-based embedded computing company has won $4 million, three-year contract to deliver solutions for a major radar systems upgrade for two classes of jet fighter for the US Air Force (USAF).

Abaco will provide 3U VPX single board computers, FPGA cards and FPGA mezzanine cards to be deployed as part of a major radar systems upgrade for two classes of USAF jet fighter, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

The SBC347D 3U VPX single board computer provides processing capability at the heart of an active electronic scanned array radar, assimilating and communicating data for presentation to the cockpit for analysis and action. Abaco’s VP780 FPGA card and FMC160 mezzanine card allow the application to complete operational airborne sky sweeps (scanning) with the results passed to the SBC347D.

The SBC347D 3U VPX single board computer features the Intel Xeon Processor D-1500 Family, using versions of the processor that offer support for up to 16 cores. It features up to 32GBytes of DDR4 ECC memory, operating at up to 2.0 MHZ, enabling superior memory performance; 32 GBytes NAND Flash (SSD), 32 MBytes BIOS Flash and 16 MBytes BIOS backup Flash memory are also provided.

A secure FPGA solution that offers inherent reliability and security features such as protection against differential power analysis (DPA) attacks and against single event upsets (SEU) as well as a range of tamper detect, encryption and zeroization features which can be implemented by the user.

The VP780 is a high performance Xilinx Virtex-7 3U VPX card with advanced digital signal processing capabilities. The design has been optimized for the implementation of complex FPGA algorithms with high throughput requirements. A VITA 57 compliant FMC site makes it possible to easily integrate I/O cards with A/D, D/A, RF capabilities and more. Optionally conduction cooled, the VP780 supports up to 10GBytes of DDR3 SDRAM and additional memory options on 2 BLAST sites.

The FMC160 provides one 12-bit A/D channel at 3.6Gsps and one 14-bit D/A channel at 5.7Gsps (2.85Gsps direct RF synthesis) clocked by either an internal clock source (optionally locked to an external reference) or an externally supplied sample clock. In addition, a trigger input for customized sampling control is available to users. The FMC160 daughter card is mechanically and electrically compliant with the FMC standard (ANSI/VITA 57.1).