Curtiss-Wright’s Defense Solutions division today announced the MPMC-9323/EWS Silver Palm, a new addition to its family of open architecture, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) based, electronic warfare (EW) / radio frequency (RF) tuner mission computers.
To address today’s emerging Electronic Warfare (EW) threats, system integrators seek to deploy the maximum number of RF channels, supported with supercomputing-class processing in a chassis small and light enough to minimise the platform’s size, weight and power (SWaP) burden.
Curtiss-Wright is the first company to collaborate with Silver Palm to design a compact, EW/RF tuner mission computer that uses a SWaP-optimised, COTS-based open architecture to lower the cost of ownership and reduce programme risk. This new compact design eases the deployment of EW hardware solutions to the warfighter and speeds the development for system integrators. This RF tuner-based EW System (EWS) is ideal for countering emerging battlefield threats in SIGINT, COMINT, and ELINT applications.
The MPMC-9323/EWS Silver Palm features an ideal combination of solutions. It integrates the Silver Palm Technologies SP-8344 20MHz-6GHz Quad Tuner with Digital IF, a Curtiss-Wright Xilinx® Kintex®-7 XF07-523 FPGA mezzanine module, and an Intel® Xeon® D-based CHAMP-XD1 DSP engine, to provide end-to-end data flow and enables the customer to focus on their application instead of the integrated hardware architecture. Even better, this EW/RF tuner mission computer is packaged in Curtiss-Wright’s 2-slot 3U OpenVPX MPMC-9323 Mission Computing System. This rugged chassis, a compelling SWaP-optimised solution – 10.5in x 5.9in x 7.7in volume and weight of 18lb – is designed to meet or exceed the most demanding thermal requirements.
The MPMC-9323 chassis’s PSU3-THOR power supply also provides system designers with two additional XMC sites that can be optionally configured to support Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports (via an XMC-651 Ethernet Switch) or up to terabytes of data storage (via an XMC-554 SSD Flash Memory card), depending on customer application requirements. To support the SP-8344 Quad Tuner module’s high-performance RF bandwidth, this EWS is Curtiss-Wright’s first mission computer to support the new VITA 67.3 subminiature blind-mate multicoaxial RF backplane connectors which deliver new levels of RF bandwidth and signal density.
“Our pre-integrated COTS mission computers speed the deployment of cost-effective, proven solutions to the warfighter,” said Lynn Bamford, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Defense Solutions division.
“To meet the demands of EW system integrators who need to deploy the maximum number of RF channels in as small an envelope as possible, we are excited to announce our collaboration with Silver Palm Technologies to combine their new Quad Channel SP-8344 3U OpenVPX RF Tuner with our best-in-class DSP engine and FPGA processor modules in a compact rugged chassis.”
MPMC-9323/EWS Silver Palm Performance Features:
- Silver Palm Technologies SP-8344:
o High-performance tuner channels
– 20MHz to 6GHz
– 40MHz IF passband - CHAMP-XD1 DSP engine
o Intel Xeon D Octal Core DSP
– 410 GFLOPs with AVX2 - XF07-523 FPGA mezzanine module
o Xilinx Kintex-7 410T FPGA processor
– User Programmable – PCIe/GTP - High bandwidth I/O options
o 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, USB - MIL-STD-810/MIL-STD-461