Partner’s Corner: Flow Down - Redefining Partnership in Today’s Military Embedded Systems

In this Partner Corner blog, we posed the following question, with answers from our partners below:
‍System integration challenges have changed over the past few years, with new demands being put on manufacturers in terms of integration, troubleshooting and system upgrades. Can you outline what ‘partnership’ means within your ecosystem in providing integrated systems to today’s customers?
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Carlie Sutherland, EIZO Rugged Solutions

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Collaboration is key to successful system integration and deployment. When different companies work together to configure component interoperability, they can quickly identify and resolve issues, reducing downtime and increasing system reliability. These partnerships between defense manufacturers and suppliers benefit end users by providing collaborative product testing and component integration in high-performance embedded computing systems.  

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By bringing together experts from different fields, such as hardware and software engineering, electronics manufacturing and system integrators, different teams can leverage their expertise to tackle complex integration challenges and develop more robust, reliable, MIL-STD-810 compliant, high-performance solutions.

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Today's customers demand design flexibility, low size, weight and power (SWaP), as well as thermally efficient components in their high-performance mission systems. They want systems that can be easily upgraded, reconfigured or customized to quickly meet their changing needs. Partnerships can help manufacturers develop more flexible systems by leveraging the expertise and resources of multiple companies. A partnership-based integration is an attractive proposition for a customer looking to save both time and cost.

Product life cycle management (PLM) is essential and can be costly when unmanaged.  The product life cycles in military electronic systems are uniquely long, due to several factors ranging from funding and acquisition to the complexity of the systems integration during the development phase to a full-rate production that can span many years.  As the product approaches its end of life, the industry is challenged with offering a solution that is, at a minimum, as close to a form, fit and functional replacement as possible, providing a seamless transition for the customer.

We’ve seen this partnership structure work firsthand through our collaboration with Elma Electronic. During the early stages of our design verification and test (DVT) process,  Elma’s readily available high-speed environment aligned to the SOSA™ technical reference standard was critical to successfully deploying our first GPGPU module aligned to SOSA. With access to Elma’s SOSA aligned backplanes and test infrastructures, we were able to connect our GPGPU with Concurrent’s SBC and validate the interoperability in a real environment  faster than we would have been able to do otherwise.  

This saved significant time and effort, allowing us to identify and fix other issues earlier throughout our DVT process and prior to customer integration.  In addition, Elma’s wide array of working partners meant we could integrate with other PIC vendors.  This level of support from Elma’s collaborative team enabled us to accelerate our DVT process and gain a much higher confidence in its readiness in a live integrated environment.  
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Franck Lefèvre, Interface Concept

System integration consists of integrating boards into a given system. (From this prospective, it can seem to be an easy task to do.) As far as Interface Concept is concerned, integration requires working closely with its partners to integrate our boards (VPX, SOSA, VME, FMC, XMC) into a standard or customer-specific system to support the interoperable ecosystem expected by the customer. Close collaboration between the partners is fundamental in delivering a quality technical support.
Beside the functional aspect, consideration for environmental constraints is paramount to system requirements in mil-aero applications. In addition to providing the necessary electronic hardware and software expertise, the sub-system integration partner, such as Elma, and the board manufacturer, such as IC, must be ready to provide an array of additional services and certifications, in order to successfully deliver for the integration project to run smoothly.  
Running and supplying the environmental test reports (temperature, vibration, shock, etc.) is necessary to ensure that the entire sub-system withstands environmental challenges that the system will be subjected to. The board manufacturer must produce and supply reliability data such as MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), so that the integrator can calculate the MTBF for the delivered system.  Some additional prerequisites include the product 3D layout as STEP files, environment conformity certificates (REACH, ROHS, WEEE) and export control certificates that must be shared between the ecosystem partners.
If we consider the whole ecosystem and challenges, a close, long term relationship between partners (sub-system integrator and board manufacturer in this case) is a critical aspect to success, now more than ever. In today’s landscape, cybersecurity expertise, together with associated services such as potential security issues, long term support, obsolescence management and the ability to supply Form-Fit-Function (FFF) boards over a long term are also important aspects in providing the integrated systems end users expect.

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Nigel Forrester, Concurrent Technologies

When the VPX standard (VITA 46) was first introduced in 2007, it solved a number of significant issues. Firstly, it was designed to ensure operational reliability in often challenging environments; and secondly, it was based on point-to-point serial fabrics that enabled high-speed interconnects between the Plug In Cards (PICs).
This initial VPX standard ensured these characteristics and quickly became the de facto standard for the development and deployment of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) systems used in defense applications.

A further refinement, OpenVPX (VITA 65), was ratified in 2010 to improve vendor interoperability. However, it wasn’t until subsequent OpenVPX updates were released in 2019 and again in 2021, that true vendor interoperability was realized, through the removal or definition of the User I/O pins.

During this same period, the complexity of the underlying technology has grown significantly to meet customer requirements.  Take Ethernet speeds as an example. Until 2015, Concurrent Technologies was shipping processor Plug In Cards (PICs) with 1G Ethernet connections. Then, a 10G Ethernet capability was introduced in 2016, followed by 40G Ethernet in 2019 and 100G Ethernet in 2022.  With each speed increment comes an increasing need to work collaboratively in partnership to ensure that all elements of the system can truly work as ‘plug-and-play’ components.  This has become more important as customer expectations have also evolved.

We see many more requirements now for ‘application-ready’ systems, rather than for building blocks for the end user to integrate. Elma Electronic has worked closely with Concurrent Technologies on a range of pioneering initiatives to make the current generation of 3U VPX-based solutions work seamlessly as part of our strategic partnership.  Elma’s 3U VPX backplanes are capable of operating at 100G Ethernet rates, so from a signal integrity perspective, both companies share information and experience at the design stage.

This means we can share S-parameter files for the relevant backplanes and Plug In Cards, enabling customers to integrate their own cards and conduct their own analysis prior to manufacturing.  Subsequent testing has confirmed the validity of these models and together we delivered 100G capable systems to customers in 2022.
Another key factor for system control and management is the implementation of updated chassis manager and payload IPMB subsystems compliant with the latest VITA 46.11 specifications.  Interoperability testing has shown that the Concurrent Technologies compute and I/O Intensive processor cards are discoverable and provide the correct information in a CompacFrame chassis with the latest chassis manager.