The Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) Consortium grew out of a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) initiative to define open standard electronic architectures to ensure component interoperability, reduce costs, encourage innovation, and help to ensure a supply of needed products.
Aerospace and defense applications demand products that are sensitive to their SWaP (size, weight and power) restrictions. In the past this put some of the highest performing GPU products out of reach because their power requirements, acceptable for a desktop computer or a data center, were too high for a device intended for an embedded application. This led embedded solution providers to use GPUs that were targeted mainly at the mobile and laptop market. While these mobile GPUs had lower power requirements they also were not as high performing as the same generation’s desktop GPUs.
The latest generation of NVIDIA® PascalTM and AMD Polaris GPUs are providing enormous increases in processing speed. However, these new GPUs have dropped native support for legacy analog formats. While this may be an obvious move for a GPU chip designer, whose primary market no longer requires analog support, it does present a challenge to customers who do still require legacy analog support. WOLF’s solution is a new FIT module, a Flexible Interface Technology module, which can be used to provide analog format support to new VPX products.
This document describes WOLF’s VPX PCI-Express port configuration options as it applies to both the VPX3U and VPX6U system architectures.
WOLF’s VPX 3U/6U modular solutions have been designed to facilitate rapid module integration into today’s highly configurable rugged system designs. WOLF’s VPX solutions combine advanced technology graphics and compute modules, legacy analog and high speed digital capture, process and display, and VPX interface configurability supporting multiple host interface options.
Modular COTS building blocks for aerospace and defense requirements enable WOLF to provide analog/digital video capture, CUDA/OpenCL GPGPU processing, H.264/H.265 encoding and display solutions for VPX, XMC and other SFF architectures.
Overview
The aerospace and defense industries are experiencing an ever-increasing demand for situational awareness capabilities for applications such as surveillance and autonomous navigation. The majority of new military and aerospace projects will require some degree of image capture, video processing, encoding and display capabilities as a part of the system.
