GUEST EDITORIALMILITARY APPLICATION<strong>CompactPCI</strong> in the military:Playing to its strengthsBy David CompstonDavid discusses the advantages<strong>CompactPCI</strong>’s inherently I/Oorientedarchitecture yields fornetwork-centric warfare <strong>and</strong> the needfor smaller, lighter solutions.To underst<strong>and</strong> where <strong>CompactPCI</strong> fits inthe military scheme of things, <strong>and</strong> the factorsthat will affect its future, it’s importantto underst<strong>and</strong> ”the nature of the beast.”How is the military different from, forexample, the telecommunications marketplace– <strong>and</strong> how does this difference affectits adoption of new technologies?The first thing to underst<strong>and</strong> is that theoverriding characteristic of the militarymarketplace is its inherent conservatism.Making technology decisions thatcan literally be a matter of life or death– rather than a bad telephone line connection– makes you somewhat cautious.The ideal military technology is stable,proven, known to be reliable, <strong>and</strong> widelyaccepted, attributes more highly prizedthan cutting edge performance.It is also true that, given the typical militaryapplication’s complexity, its mannerof deployment, <strong>and</strong> the nature of how thatdevelopment <strong>and</strong> deployment are funded,vendors measure project timescales inyears or very often in decades. This forcesattention onto issues such as obsolescencemitigation <strong>and</strong> long term support, againcausing the military to value technologiesthat have proven longevity. Beyondthis, the military faces the requirement tointegrate with an enormous installed baseof legacy systems. As a result, developmenttends to be evolutionary, rather thanrevolutionary.This approach often meant that, historically,the military struggled to stayabreast of technology developments.The l<strong>and</strong>scape changed, however, withSenator William Perry’s memor<strong>and</strong>umof June 1994 which, in effect, m<strong>and</strong>atedthat in the future the US defense industry,which represents a huge proportion of thedefense industry worldwide, should nolonger design <strong>and</strong> develop its own proprietarysolutions, but should rather takeadvantage of the substantial cost savingsavailable from implementing CommercialOff-the-Shelf (COTS) solutions instead.Although primarily intended as a costsavingmeasure, COTS brought new technologiesto military applications morequickly <strong>and</strong>, through adherence to industryst<strong>and</strong>ards, delivered the high degreeof interoperability that was fundamentalto the military’s requirements. The COTSapproach has also reduced the time tomarket for new applications.The foregoing may give some insightas to why it is that <strong>CompactPCI</strong> has notthus far made the progress in the militarymarket that might reasonably havebeen expected, especially given the pervasivenature of PCI technology both onthe desktop, <strong>and</strong> as enabling technologyfor the majority of boards sold into militaryapplications. Although PCI has beenaround for 10 years, it is still, in militaryeyes, a newcomer by comparison withVMEbus. VMEbus is the bus architectureat the heart of the majority of militarysystems <strong>and</strong> has been around for a quarterof a century. The history of VMEbus is aremarkable one, not least in the ability ithas consistently demonstrated to embrace<strong>and</strong> adapt to emerging technologies.But if the advent of COTS opened thedoor to <strong>CompactPCI</strong>, it is the real changein military thinking that is likely to see itestablishing at least a substantial toehold.The buzz phrase in military circles is network-centricwarfare, <strong>and</strong> it describes anew paradigm in which military “appliances”are viewed as nodes on a network,with local electronic intelligence at thepoint of deployment. Future battles willbe won by the force that can most quicklygather, analyze, distribute, <strong>and</strong> act oninformation. That’s nothing new in warfare,of course.An important goal of network-centricwarfare is that it should be technologyintensive,not personnel-intensive.“Sensor to shooter” solutions, for example,capture the idea that a potentialtarget can be identified, acquired, <strong>and</strong>dealt with in a single, seamless electronicprocess that requires no human intervention.Unmanned vehicles, whetherUnmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) orUnmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), arethe next logical step in this direction.Limits to VME 3U implementationsWhile either can be of any size (a UAV, forexample, can range from a h<strong>and</strong>-launchedunit to one which requires a traditionalrunway) the trend is towards small <strong>and</strong>lightweight to maximize both deployability<strong>and</strong> mission range. This trend presentssomething of a conundrum to designersof military systems, because it points tothe need for a solution built around the 3Uform factor. VMEbus, which would otherwisebe the natural choice, does not readilylend itself to “small <strong>and</strong> lightweight.”Designed for high performance, multiprocessorapplications in harsh environments,VME is highly scalable, but its 3U implementationhas three important limitations.The first of these is that VMEbus systemsare power-hungry, <strong>and</strong> thus generate heatthat has to be dissipated. Second, the full64-bit implementation of VMEbus is onlyavailable in its 6U format. This createsperformance constraints for the smallersystems, which may only use the 16-bitimplementation. Third, <strong>and</strong> perhaps mostimportantly, VMEbus in its 3U form providesnegligible rear I/O, greatly reducingits flexibility.<strong>CompactPCI</strong>, on the other h<strong>and</strong>, providesan architecture that is inherentlyI/O-oriented, with the availability of75 pins across the backplane. Its 32-bitparallel bus offers potentially higherperformance than VMEbus in its 3U form.It is designed to support a maximum of8 slots – compared with VMEbus’s 21 slots18 / <strong>CompactPCI</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>AdvancedTCA</strong> <strong>Systems</strong> / June 2005
RSC# 19 @www.compactpci-systems.com/rsc <strong>CompactPCI</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>AdvancedTCA</strong> <strong>Systems</strong> / June 2005 / 19
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