Military/Aerospace – Drone Aircraft Tracking & Control

The Customer Need

This military customer has several versions of control systems used to direct and track drone aircraft. These systems are mounted in a variety of ground-based vehicles and trailers. Long-lasting computer sub-components are needed in order to ensure the military end user that the exact same configuration remains available throughout the system’s deployment and usability cycle. The cycle range for this drone aircraft control application is a minimum of 7 years and a maximum of 10 years. Low-power, dual-core processors are needed in the application and the backplanes must be able to handle a variety of PCI-X and PCI Express® option cards. Finally, due to the sensitive nature of the technology used in the application, the government requires the computer hardware to be designed and built in the U.S.

The Trenton Solution

Trenton’s SLT system host board is a PICMG® 1.3 SHB that features two, dual-core processors and each processor has a maximum thermal design power rating (TDP) of 31W. The processing performance of the SLT meets the telemetry data throughput requirements of the application. The CPUs’ lower TDP ratings as well as the lower power usage ratings of the SLT board’s other components also meet the thermal and power draw requirements of the end user. The Trenton BPX3/8 backplane is used in most of the aircraft control mobile stations with other station configurations utilizing different Trenton PICMG 1.3 backplanes. Initially considered was a motherboard system design, but the option card slot variability and the need to support faster Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) times lead to a PICMG 1.3 architecture.

Trenton Value Delivered

Trenton’s engineering and manufacturing locations in the U.S. met all of the domestic content rules defined by the government in this application. The data processing capability of the SLT board exceeds all of the application performance parameters designed by the OEM and the military end user. The embedded components used by Trenton in the system host board and backplane designs will enable support for the entire length of the military deployment cycle.