Now with over eighteen years of experience under its belt, CompactPCI can claim to offer all the factors that attract military decision makers. An expanding set of conduction-cooled CompactPCI boards has emerged, some even from outside the usual crowd of conduction-cooled board makers. These include a vast and growing collection of cPCI products that are available from a variety of vendors in every category including single board computers, I/O boards, slot-card power supplies, storage subsystems, mezzanine carriers, DSP engines and many others. The “Conduction-Cooled cPCI Boards Roundup” on the following pages showcases some examples of the current crop of conduction-cooled cPCI single board computer products. While cPCI isn’t ever expected to eclipse the legacy of VME in the military market, its niche remains solid.

Meanwhile, the PCI Industrial Manufacturers Group (PICMG) continues to develop performance upgrade paths for cPCI, such as PICMG 2.16 and CompactPCI Express. Most recently, PICMG last month adopted the PICMG 2.30 specification, called CompactPCI PlusIO. This new specification adds PCI Express, Ethernet, SATA, SAS and USB extensions to the CompactPCI family of specifications, while preserving PCI bus connectivity. The specification defines the use of previously reserved rear I/O pins for the 64-bit CompactPCI system slot with new high-speed serial signals to preserve interoperability with existing CompactPCI standards.

The attraction to CompactPCI—particularly in its 3U size—is striking in military applications where the mix of size constraints and demand for sturdy slot-card-style ruggedness is called for. In many case, 3U CompactPCI is delivered to customers in complete integrated systems—a trend that melds nicely with the emergence of “stand-alone rugged box systems” as a product category among military embedded board vendors. Also fueling that trend is consolidation in this industry to the point were the larger corporations can provide the entire computer, I/O and enclosure needs themselves.

In the past couple years, a growing number of vendors have made public announcements of military and aerospace design wins for their conduction-cooled cPCI products. And considering that many such wins aren’t made public, it’s clear that cPCI is enjoying a lot of adoption in military and aerospace system designs. Embedded computers and the payload interface unit aboard the MQ-8B Fire Scout (Figure 1) are 3U CompactPCI boards supplied by GE Intelligent Platforms.

CompactPCI is also playing a major role in the Navy’s Aegis Modernization (AMOD) program. The effort involves both software and technology insertion hardware upgrades running through fiscal year 2012. General Micro Systems’ 2.16 GHz conduction-cooled cPCI board was chosen as a processor for the program. AMOD is an upgrade to the Aegis Weapon System (AWS), the automated segment of the Aegis Combat System (ACS), which will satisfy the anti-air warfare and ballistic missile defense (BMD) mission requirements on Aegis cruisers and destroyers.