Fibre-Channel controller takes on military tasks

New from Data Device Corporation (DDC) is the FibreAccess series of 2Gbit/s Fibre Channel network interface controllers (NICs).

New from Data Device Corporation (DDC) is the FibreAccess series of 2Gbit/s Fibre Channel network interface controllers (NICs).

DDC has designed the FC-75000 FibreAccess NIC from the ground up to meet the demanding challenges of flight-critical military applications and harsh military environments.

The FibreAccess NICs feature a dual redundant architecture with autonomous fail-over or dual independent channels, low memory to memory message latency, deterministic autonomous message scheduling, and built-in avionics upper layer protocols on conduction cooled PMC card making it ideally suited for the most rigorous military applications.

"Our focus throughout the entire product definition, design and development phases has been to provide a design that guarantees highly deterministic performance required by flight critical and mission critical applications", said Todd Decker, Marketing Manager at DDC for Data Networking Components.

Features such as implicit login, priority message scheduling and support of avionics protocols found in ANSI Technical Report "Fibre Channel for avionics environments" (FC-AE) such as ASM and FC/AE-1553 make the FibreAccess technology especially well suited for military-oriented applications.

FibreAccess employs a flexible FPGA based architecture that allows DDC to tailor the design to meet the specific needs of applications and to support the multi-decade life cycles of military programmes.

The FC-75000 series of conduction cooled Fibre Channel NICs operate over a wide -40 to +85C temperature range and are initially available with a transformer-coupled copper interface with either front panel connection, PMC rear connection or a fibre-optic interface.

DDC supplies software drivers for VxWorks and plans to support other software operating systems later this year.

"DDC is paving a transition path from older and slower bus technologies to new high-speed network technologies with its introduction of FC-AE-1553 protocol available in the FibreAccess series of products", says Amir Massumi, Director of Marketing at DDC.

"The FC-AE-1553 protocol is designed to allow re-usability of legacy system software, legacy buses and existing avionics boxes that gave the solidly deterministic performance of MIL-STD-1553 and add the high datarates, low latency and enormous network size capability of Fibre Channel".

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