• Pre-integrates underlying data acquisition, processing and visualisation functionality
• Leverages best-in-breed technologies from Intel, NVIDIA, Xilinx to deliver 14 TFLOPS
• Supports AI, machine learning for leading edge applications
• Fully rugged for all-environment reliability

Abaco announced the Obox, a R&D evaluation platform designed to reduce the time, expense and risk of developing autonomous platforms for military applications on land, in the air and on the ocean.
A fully rugged (-40°C to + 71°C) enclosure houses customer-specified combinations of Abaco’s latest 3U VPX single board computers, FPGA/DSP subsystems and AI/GPGPU-enabled platforms to deliver up to 14 TeraFLOPS of computing power, together with high speed network switches. Scalable and flexible, the Obox has been specifically designed to capture the input from sensors – including Lidar, radar and cameras, integrated over Ethernet – and to drive actuators controlling velocity, trajectory and more. It enables the full range of autonomous operations, including detection, recognition, tracking, fusion, perception, planning, decision and effecting.
“We created the Obox to give customers the optimum head-start in developing autonomous platforms by providing a turnkey solution - pre-integrating the hardware and software on which to build – enabling them to focus faster on the specifics of the planned application rather than on the low level platform,” said Peter Thompson, Vice President, Product Management at Abaco. “By leveraging our expertise in hardware/software integration, customers will save time and money, minimize program risk and enable faster time-to-market and deployment.”

​The SRS-1201-BLUBRICK® is an embedded rugged system platform for a wide range of applications. The modular concept is based on CompactPCI® Serial, a well-established industrial standard for IEEE 3U CPU- and I/O-boards. The SRS-1201-BLUBRICK® comprises a 3-slot backplane and a DC power supply suitable for either automotive, industrial or railway usage.
The SRS-1201-BLUBRICK® is available either as basic enclosure, equipped w. backplane and power supply, or turn-key ready configured with a CompactPCI® Serial CPU card and up to two I/O or SSD mass storage boards. The rugged box of extruded aluminium is provided with a mounting plate and available either for conductive cooling, or equipped with one or two fans for forced airflow.

More information.

Abaco announced the FMC172 Wideband Low Latency FMC Module. Designed for customers developing advanced embedded computing applications in electronic warfare, digital radar, wide band receivers and wireless communications SDR among others, it brings industry leading ADC and DAC functionality on a single card.
The FMC172 is based on the latest high performance ADC device from Texas Instruments and DAC devices from E2V. It is the fastest ADC Abaco offers with LVDS interfaces, delivering up to 6.4 GSPS ADC on a single channel (or two channels @ 3.2 GSPS) and up to 6.0 GSPS DAC, making it among the fastest low-latency devices available on the market. The combination of the FMC172’s >6.0 GHz bandwidth, its high sample rate and low latency is ideal for advanced Digital RF Memory (DRFM) systems.

When paired with Abaco’s state-of-the-art FPGA carrier cards such as the VP889 or VP869, the FMC172 gives customers the platform to solve some of the most difficult challenges when designing modern DSP systems.
“The FMC172 provides customers with yet another option to expand bandwidth for analog receivers and transmitters,” said Peter Thompson, Vice President, Product Management at Abaco Systems. “Our previous generation FMC170 supported one channel at 5GSPS in both input and output; the FMC172 extends this to 6.4 GSPS at 10-bits, or two ADC channels at 3.2 GSPS. Many customers have monolithic FPGA with ADC cards in use, and it is challenging to update such a design to the latest ADC and DAC technology as moving forward would often require a complete board/system redesign.”
“The FMC172 is a prime example of how the evolving FMC standard allows customers who invest in this powerful mezzanine-based architecture can continue to evolve their analog I/O FPGA based systems with minimal changes to their existing DSP and FPGA architecture,” Thompson continued. “As such, it is very much aligned with our philosophy of providing our customers with a straightforward migration path that enables them to easily leverage the higher performance that new technologies bring.”
The FMC172 allows flexible control of clock source, sampling frequency, and calibration through I2C communication. The ADC has individual calibration circuits for fine-tuning of gain, offset, and phase. The card is equipped with power supply and temperature monitoring and offers several power-down modes to switch off unused functions or protect the card from overheating.
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More information.

On the occasion of the Embedded World Exhibition & Conference (Nuremberg, 26.2.- 28.2. 2019) EKF will introduce the SC6-TANGO, a low power CompactPCI® Serial CPU board, based on an Intel® Atom™ E39xxseries System-on-Chip processor (Apollo Lake APL-I).
The front panel is provided with two Gigabit Ethernet jacks (option M12 X-coded),
two USB 3.0 Type-A receptacles, and two DisplayPort monitor connectors.
The board is equipped with 8GB directly soldered DDR3L ECC RAM, and a CFast™ card socket, for use as removable SATA SSD.
Optionally available is an on-board 64GByte e•MMC flash memory chip. Further more, a low profile dual M.2 SATA SSD mezzanine module is available as additional mass storage solution (4HP envelope), and also a multifunction side card (8HP front width). The SC6-TANGO backplane connectors provide a CompactPCI Serial system with 4 x PCIe and optionally 2 x GbE. Due to its robustness and very low power consumption, the card is also suitable as stand-alone solution (IoT & Edge computing).

More information.

There is growing demand for private broadband cellular networks from governments, defence, military and search and rescue organisations, institutions involved in public safety and disaster relief, and industries with remote and distributed facilities, such as oil and gas exploration. These organisations are specifying systems that work with commercial networks and equipment, so they can lower costs by using standard devices (smart phones, tablets) and existing infrastructure to access their private networks.  

​Read the complete document here.

Abaco Systems announced the rugged 3U VPX GR2 and GR4 video and graphics cards. Designed for military and defence applications as well as challenging commercial/industrial applications, both feature the newest generation NVIDIA® Pascal™ GPUs, enabling them to deliver up to 6.4 TeraFLOPS of performance and offer up to 4.5x the performance of their predecessor, Abaco’s GRA113 video/graphics board.
The two new products are the first fruits of Abaco’s previously announced collaboration with EIZO Rugged Solutions.
The GR4 features full video capture and output, while the GR2 provides a cost-effective alternative for customers only requiring video output. As well as graphics and video applications, both are ideal for GPGPU applications that can leverage the enormously parallel nature of the Pascal architecture, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous systems and high performance embedded computing (HPEC) applications such as ISR, C4ISR and remote sensing/analysis.
A choice of processor is available for both the GR2 and GR4. For particularly challenging applications, the NVIDIA Quadro® P5000 with 16 GBytes of GDDR5 memory is capable of delivering up to 6.4 TeraFLOPS of throughput from 2,048 CUDA cores. For less demanding applications, or those where lower power consumption/heat dissipation is a priority, the NVIDIA Quadro P3000 with 6 GBytes of GDDR5 memory and 1,280 cores provides up to 3.9 TeraFLOPS of peak FP32 performance.
 
The conduction-cooled GR4 supports PCI Express™ 3.0 (8- or 4- lane) and features four 3G-SDI video inputs/outputs and one DisplayPort™ output providing support for 4K resolution. Video encode/decode uses either the HEVC/H.265 or AVC/H.264 codec.
The GR2 includes two DisplayPort outputs from the rear P2 VPX connector, and supports PCI Express 3.0 (16-, 8- or 4- lane). It is available in either an air-cooled or conduction-cooled variant.
Both the GR4 and GR2 support CUDA™ and OpenCL™, and are available with Windows® and Linux® drivers. 

More information.

I​n Part III of our tutorial series, Elma’s technical product expert Michael Munroe describes the ins and outs of RF and optical connectivity using backplane apertures. Learn how OpenVPX addresses the high speed and high signal integrity needs of mission-critical applications by bringing RF and optical connectors to system backplanes in a straightforward modular fashion.

Parts I and II can be found here.
Part I, The Fundamentals, discusses the evolution of the standard, it's operational advantages and general architectural terms and definitions.
Part II, Understanding Profiles, examines the purpose of slot profiles and module profiles in defining VPX board connectivity.

• Rugged data communication products for applications in demanding environments, including airborne, military, railway and subsea
• Products of precise Time-over-Ethernet according to IEEE 1588 (PTP) and IEEE 802.1as (gPTP)
• Customised Ethernet solutions to fit specific needs.

OnTime Networks was founded in 2000 and is recognised as an innovator for rugged Ethernet solutions for Real Time Applications within the Aerospace and Defence Industries. OnTime’s equipment is used by major customers such as Airbus Commercial Aircraft, Boeing Commercial Aircraft, L-3 Communications, Zodiac, Airbus Helicopter, EMGS, Schlumberger.

The main product lines are:​
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