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.