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Rugged 3U single board computer

Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing has introduced the VPX3-129, a new rugged Power Architecture-based 3U VPX (VITA 46) SBC (single board computer). This small form-factor SBC augments the performance and advanced I/O capabilities of Freescale’s QorIQ P4080 eight-core communications processor with a wide I/O complement to provide a highly capable 3U VPX SBC. Designed to support the new OpenVPX system interoperability specification for VPX, the VPX3-129 is suitable for a range of embedded commercial and military/aerospace applications including tactical aircraft, armored vehicles or rugged naval systems. The SBC’s integral high-speed VPX backplane and XMC mezzanine connectivity enables multi-Gbyte/s data flows from board-to-board via the backplane, and from the backplane to the XMC site, to support the acquisition, processing, and distribution of high-bandwidth sensor input such as video, radar and sonar data.

The board’s rich I/O complement includes two Gigabit Ethernet ports (1000-x capable), four serial channels, up to 8 bits of discrete digital I/O, USB (universal serial bus) 2.0 ports, and an XMC mezzanine site with 64-bits of I/O mapped to the backplane. It accommodates either dual SRIO high speed fabric ports to the backplane or up to three PCIe ports to provide plenty of high speed connectivity. The VPX3-129 SBC and the companion VPX3-215 ExpressReach expansion card are built in conformance with the company’s CSA (Continuum Software Architecture), an interoperability initiative under its COTS Continuum programme that eases system upgrades and compatibility across product lines through the use of standardized APIs and abstraction of hardware layers. Operating environment support includes drivers for operating environments including Wind River VxWorks/Tornado (6.x) and Wind River Linux 3.0. The new SBC is designed for high-performance defense and aerospace applications and is offered in a range of rugged configurations including air-cooled (Level 0/100) and conduction-cooled (Level 100/200). Advanced cooling techniques are employed to handle high performance implementations.