Curtiss-Wright Introduces New Central-Switched and Pass-Through Backplanes for Harsh Environments

By Caroline Rees / 10 Sep 2014
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Fabric40 Backplane

Curtiss-Wright Expands its Hybricon® Family of Fabric40™ OpenVPX Backplanes

Curtiss-Wright Corporation has announced that its Defense Solutions division has expanded its industry leading family of 40Gbps Gen3 OpenVPX™ backplanes with the introduction of three new Hybricon® central-switched Fabric40™ OpenVPX backplanes and two new Gen3 OpenVPX-optimized Fabric40 OpenVPX pass-through backplanes. Curtiss-Wright’s Fabric40 family of backplanes is designed to enable end-to-end transmission of the high speed data required for the most demanding ground and airborne C4ISR and EW deployed applications. They deliver over 2x the performance of previous generation Serial RapidIO (SRIO) Gen-2-based systems and 4x the performance of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE)-based systems.

The new Gen3 OpenVPX backplanes support full-speed, bottleneck-free distribution of data over, Gen3 PCI-Express, 40Gbps Ethernet or InfiniBand® fabrics. Featuring patent-pending signal integrity technology to ensure application reliability and reduced risk, these high performance backplanes enable the design of a new class of embedded subsystems capable of delivering previously unobtainable levels of performance to support numerous demanding defense and aerospace EW, SIGINT, RADAR applications, such as the real-time detection and identification of signals of interest. Designed for deployment in harsh defense and aerospace environments, Hybricon backplanes are ideal for use in air, naval, ground vehicles, and base station platforms.

“With the introduction of these new Central-Switched and Pass-Through OpenVPX backplanes, our Hybricon family of Fabric40 Backplanes offers system integrators the widest range of Gen3 OpenVPX high speed backplanes available,” said Lynn Bamford, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Defense Solutions division. “Together with the previously introduced members of our groundbreaking Fabric40 family of modules and backplanes, these new backplanes deliver the highest OpenVPX processing bandwidth available to the embedded defense and aerospace market. They significantly reduce the signal integrity risks and data flow restrictions that confront system designers when adopting the latest generation of 40 Gbps processing technology.”

Fabric40 Gen3 OpenVPX backplanes are designed for use in both development and rugged deployed applications. In air-cooled or conduction-cooled development chassis, the new backplane speeds and eases the integration of compute-intensive radar, signal and image processing for ground or airborne platforms. Curtiss-Wright can also design application-specific configurations to meet a customer’s individual requirements.

Fabric40, Signal Integrity and End-to-End Interoperability

Designed to stringent Curtiss-Wright Gen3 Signal Integrity (SI) design rules, Hybricon Fabric40 backplanes exceed VITA 68 VPX compliance channel draft standard guidelines. Curtiss-Wright’s proprietary SI methods minimize signal impairments, such as high return loss, crosstalk and mode conversion (patent pending), to deliver reliable SI performance at speeds up to 10.3 Gbaud, resulting in the best performance and lowest risk backplane platform in the industry.

40Gbps High Speed Modules and Backplanes

Curtiss-Wright’s innovative Fabric40 initiative ensures that all aspects of 40Gbps data fabric technology are optimally configured to work together, which greatly enhances interoperability and reduces customer integration risks and development time. Curtiss-Wright is developing all of the subsystem elements required by system designers to integrate complete, end-to-end 40Gbps embedded systems. OpenVPX systems built using the new Hybricon Fabric40 Gen3 OpenVPX backplane and complementary Fabric40 system products, such as the CHAMP-AV9 DSP engine, CHAMP-FX4 FPGA card, CHAMP-DRFM digital RF memory card, VPX6-6802 Switch card, and VPX6-1958 single board computer (SBC), will deliver over 2x the performance of previous generation SRIO Gen-2-based systems and 4x the performance of 10 GbE-based systems.

Posted by Caroline Rees Caroline co-founded Unmanned Systems Technology and has been at the forefront of the business ever since. With a Masters Degree in marketing Caroline has her finger on the pulse of all things unmanned and is committed to showcasing the very latest in unmanned technical innovation. Connect & Contact