A couple years ago COTS Journal coined a new term to describe a trend steadily gaining steam for the past seven or so years. The term is “Stand-Alone Rugged Boxes” and it applies to complete system boxes—which often support standard form factor boards inside them. These systems provide a complete, tested and enclosed computing solution that eliminates complex integration chores for military customers. This idea has been gathering momentum in the past couple years whereby traditional embedded board vendors are adding stand-alone rugged box-level systems to their military market offerings. Within the last two years the concept has really become a fixture in this market. And now it has broadened to include a larger contingent of smaller form factor board vendors. And it’s deepened with the emergence of rugged box-level systems that offers complete environmental control including advanced cooling technologies.

Exemplifying the environmental control direction is SprayCool’s 9-slot enclosure. Although not a complete stand-alone box itself, it’s expected to facilitate the trend toward more integrated box-level solutions. The SprayCool 9-slot enclosure uses the company’s patented 2-phase liquid-cooling technology for maximum environmental control and flexibility, and can operate in temperatures ranging from -40° to +60°C. The product is also easily upgradeable, capable of accepting a wide range of card types within the same chassis, simplifying the technology refresh cycle. It provides years of thermal headroom as it is capable of supporting sets of boards with almost twice the power and thermal load as those deployed today.

Environmental Controlled Enclosures

Last month SprayCool was awarded a contract by General Dynamics to supply additional enclosures for the Command Variant of the USMC Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) (Figure 1). Once deployed, the EFV will help the Marines sustain inland combat operations with onboard electronics that provide on-the-move command and control capabilities. The heart of the C2 architecture is the Multi-Processor Unit (MPU) that SprayCool is under contract to provide. The Command Variant of the USMC EFV uses high-end commercial-grade electronics in a SprayCool enclosure to deliver mission processing demands. The commercial boards in the SprayCool MPU, which were originally designed to be air-cooled, include five servers, a switch, an I/O board and two expansion cards. The SprayCool MPUs are fully rugged, sealed enclosures that enable commercial boards to meet the temperature, vibration and EMI requirements of MIL-STD 810F and MIL-STD 461, and have been extensively tested in the EFV vehicle environment.

At present, there are more than a dozen vendors that have some sort of stand-alone rugged box-level system in their offerings—many even have whole product lines in that category. Among these are Advantech, Aitech Computers, Ampro Computers, AP Labs, Curtiss-Wright, DRS Technologies, General Micro Systems, GE Fanuc Embedded Systems, Macrolink, MEN Micro, Octagon Systems, Parvus, Quantum 3D, Rave Computer, RTD Embedded Technologies, Tracewell Systems, VersaLogic, VMETRO, WIN Enterprises and WinSystems.

Many Different Twists

As a product category, stand-alone rugged boxes are somewhat difficult to define because they’re available in a variety of shapes, sizes and capabilities. They typically comprise a set of modular embedded boards housed in a rugged enclosure that has its own power supply and interface ports to link to a variety of user terminals. Often the boards in the box are standards-based cards such as PC/104, PMC and 3U CompactPCI. But the enclosures by and large aren’t in any industry standard footprint, although that may change as standards like MicroTCA and some box-level VITA standards gain acceptance in the military realm.

Recently a number of vendors from the PC/104 communities have joined the stand-alone rugged box trend. This stacked multi-board PC/104 architecture provides for a shock- and vibration-resistant off-the-shelf computing solution by eliminating backplanes and metal card cages, making PC/104 ideal for military vehicles such as tanks or even Humvees.

Built especially for military program requirements, a growing assortment of semi-custom PC/104 enclosure and chassis solutions has been available from several PC/104 vendor companies. Within the past year or so that trend has advanced to where these stand-alone box-level computers with PC/104 inside are now part of many vendors’ product lines, rather than just a pure custom solution. This fits in with the broader trend where traditional embedded board vendors are adding stand-alone rugged box-level systems to their military market offerings.

An example along those lines is the DuraCOR 810 (Figure 2) from Parvus. It’s a rugged tactical computing platform integrating a low-power 1.4 GHz Pentium M processor and PC/104 card expansion slots. The Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) chose the DuraCOR 810 processor systems and DuraMAR 1000 mobile routers for use with the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program.

Most rugged-box vendors are traditional board-level product vendors who expanded up the food chain by adding box-level products to their offerings. In contrast, Quantum3D began in the small, wearable computing space and expanded into rugged box-level systems for larger form factor applications.

Late last year Quantum3D rolled out its third-generation Thermite Tactical Visual Computer (TVC-3.0) Model 1000 (Figure 3), in both deployable units and development kits, and it is now available for purchase. The 3.0 version is designed to complement the Thermite TVC-2.0 family by providing a range of higher performance models that are optimized for deployed, extended-environment, vehicle-mount and man-wearable advanced visual computing applications. Example applications include embedded training and mission rehearsal, 3D-enabled C4ISR, sensor processing and C2 that require desktop-level visual computing performance in a small form factor, conduction-cooled, mil-spec rugged system.

To support these performance-intensive requirements, Thermite TVC-3.0 systems, including the Model 1000, are available with CPU/memory modules equipped with the latest Intel mobile processors including Core 2 Duo processors with up to 4 Gbytes of high-performance system memory. Also included are graphics modules with either NVIDIA or AMD advanced mobile 2D/3D GPUs with up to 256 Mbytes of memory and FPGA-based processing subsystems including Quantum3D’s Eidetix advanced, video capture and display subsystems.

Expandable Box with Thermal Features

A high-performance mobile server arrives as the latest member of Octagon Systems’ Core Systems line of rugged systems with expandable I/O and fanless operation. The RMB-S (Figure 4) is a “no compromise” design that optimizes the electrical, thermal and mechanical components for maximum reliability. The basic unit includes the processing power, mobile power supply, memory, connector card and I/O for most applications. Standard I/O includes dual Ethernet, quad USB 2.0, dual serial, CRT & LCD video and digital I/O. The RMB-S is fully functional out of the box, and additional I/O, such as GPS, analog, radio or Wi-Fi, can be readily added via PC/104 and PC/104-Plus modules.

An option panel can be easily removed and punched for custom annunciators, connectors and controls. Heat from the system is channeled directly to the case to help prevent internal hot spots. The RMB-S mobile server operates in ambient temperatures from -40° to 70°C, depending upon the processor speed, user options and mass storage devices. A MIL-810F version offers a case with military-grade connectors and gasket sealing to provide dust-resistant, waterproof protection in outdoor environments.

As a follow on to their SparyCool 9 line of enclosures, SprayCool recently introduced its Multi-Platform Enclosure (MPE). The MPE (Figure 5) chassis employs the company’s patented two-phase cooling technology. The MPE’s controlled operating environment enables all electronics to operate effectively in the military’s most demanding environments. The MPE enclosure can scale from 4 slots to 21 slots and is designed to meet industry standard designs for 6U x 160 mm VME-64X, VPX, VXS, cPCI and CPCIe (EXP.0), and proprietary electronics boards, and offers significantly more cooling capability per slot (above 300 watts) than enclosures using older cooling technologies such as air or conduction cooling.

Advantech
Irvine, CA.
(949) 789-7178.
[www.advantech.com].

Ampro Computers
San Jose, CA.
(408) 360-0200.
[www.ampro.com].

Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing
Leesburg, VA.
(703) 737-3660.
[www.cwcembedded.com].

GE Fanuc Embedded Systems
Charlottesville, VA.
(800) 368-2738.
[www.gefanucembedded.com].

Octagon Systems
Westminster, CO.
(303) 430-1500.
[www.octagonsystems.com].

Parvus
Salt Lake City, UT.
(801) 483-1533.
[www.parvus.com].

Quantum3D
San Jose, CA.
(408) 361-9999.
[www.quantum3d.com].

SprayCool
Liberty Lake, WA.
(509) 232-2600.
[www.spraycool.com].

WIN Entreprises
N. Andover, MA.
(978) 688-2000.
[www.win-ent.com].

WinSystems
Arlington, TX.
(817) 274-7553.
[www.winsystems.com].