Never a community keen on embracing change for change’s sake, the military market has been cautious about serial switched fabrics. That resistance is thawing as fabrics move into nearly every level of standards-based embedded computing.
Large-scale networked applications, like shipboard nets, push the limits of traditional distributed architectures. A blend of switched fabric hardware and publish-subscribe software helps smooth the way.
Armed with PCI Express as its physical layer, Advanced Switching Interconnect offers a feast of features well suited for advanced military embedded processing needs.
Now that military engineers must deal with the effects of RoHS compliance on top of other component obsolescence problems, the DoD and its suppliers are developing several programs to help.
Increasingly sophisticated systems are based on PMC, the military’s mezzanine card of choice. The processor PMC enables highly integrated defense applications that demand high performance, lots of I/O throughput and low power consumption.
