AiTech Targets Military And Space Systems

Jan. 26, 2006

AiTech Defense Systems targets a wide range of military and space systems. I had a chance to talk with Doug Patterson, VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing, about the latter...

William G. Wong

AiTech Defense Systems targets a wide range of military and space systems. I had a chance to talk with Doug Patterson, VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing, about the latter and will hopefully have a bit more about the difficulty of electronics designed for space. Unlike many defense systems that can be ruggedized from commercial designs or vice versa, systems destined for space work best when designed from scratch. Redundancy needs to be incorporated at a rather low level.

In the meantime, I have a quick overview of the boards AiTech was showing off at the Bus and Board show. The first is the C437 rugged analog/digital I/O board (see Fig. 1). The 6U VME board includes 24 AEEC-compliant ARINC-429 channels (16 receive and 8 transmit), 60 single-ended discrete analog inputs, 2 differential analog inputs, and 51 single-ended discrete analog outputs. There are also four opto-isolated, 16-bit differential analog inputs and four differential analog outputs that operate over a –10-V to 10-V range.

The C437 also has its own MP3 player. Just the thing for pre-recorded audio. There is on-board flash and SRAM dedicated to the player. Supported formats include MP3+V, WAV, PCM and MPEG 1, and MPEG2 audio.

The low-power board requires only 14 W. The board is IEEE 1101.2 compliant. Air- and conduction-cooled versions are available. Pricing starts at $3955.

On the processor side, AiTech showed off its C101L and C106L 6U VME64x-compliant single board computers (see Fig. 2). The former sports a lower power 1-GHz MPC 7457 PowerPC processor. The latter uses a 1-GHz MPC 7447A using less than 22 W. Both boards include 4 Gbytes of NAND flash and up to 1 Gbyte of 133-MHz SDRAM. Peripheral interfaces include three Fast Ethernet ports, two dual-redundant MIL-STD-1553B interfaces, a pair of USB 2.0 ports, and ten serial ports along with single-ended and differential I/O channels. The board has two 64-bit, 66-MHz PMC sites. Support is available for Wind River VxWorks, Green Hills Integrity and Integrity-178, and TimeSys Linux. Pricing starts at $6600. Air- and conduction-cooled versions are available.

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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