Aitech Launches Radiation-Tolerant, Layer 2 Gigabit Ethernet Switch PMC

Aitech Defense Systems Inc., an independent manufacturer of open architecture electronic boards and subsystem level products for harsh, environmentally-demanding defense and aerospace applications, announced the availability of radiation-tolerant, Layer 2 Gigabit Ethernet switch PCI (News - Alert) mezzanine card (PMC) called S750, which transfers Ethernet data to and from gigabit Ethernet NIC (News - Alert) end-points and the host CPU quickly and reliably.

Tailor-made for harsh space environments such as low earth orbit (LEO) Mars terrestrial and geostationary earth orbit (GEO), the new PMC has on-board memory. The key function redundancy has been implemented in a rad-hard FPGA.

Featuring a rugged design ideal for harsh space applications, the new S750 PMC features up to four 100/1000BaseT and full duplex Ethernet ports. It also features one emulated virtual network port for network access to the single board computer (SBC) network stack via the local PCI bus.

The S750 PMC operates on Aitech's premier PowerPC-based 3U CompactPCI (News - Alert), S950 SBC. With this, user can initiate managed switch functions, such as, statically and dynamically configurable GbE packet transfers, port management and multiple power-saving options, depending on various and unique application requirements to match many types of mission profiles.

Officials with Aitech said that the S750 leverages direct memory-mapped access to provide local switch management and operational status of both the switch functions. It uses direct memory-mapped access to enable or disable individual port operation or MAC address translation via the local 32-bit PCI bus.

In addition, the S750 PMC features an 8 MB no-overhead, direct memory addressable buffer allocated in the SBC SDRAM with an Aitech proprietary, real-time, no wait-state triple voting algorithm- for added redundancy and data integrity.

Other features of S750 PMC includes more than 10 krad (Si) minimum unshielded total ionizing dose (TID); and low single event upset (SEU) rate and low power consumption of less than 8 W.

In the recent news, Aitech announced the launch of a unique, rugged 6U VPX SBC (single board computer), C110, which offers the selection between PCI Express or Serial Rapid IO (SRIO) and a host of on-board I/O ports.

The new single-slot C110 uses an integrated dual core PowerPC processor and combines low power performance with increased memory capabilities, making the board ideal for Radar system boot computers, Sonar processors, video and graphics engines and single board process and machine control applications.