As I immersed myself in the world of Embedded Computing Boards it quickly became clear that the early days of the market were driven by Aerospace applications so it made sense to talk to Curtiss-Wright who is legendary in this market. Legendary you say? Typical Blaza hyperbole? Well let me just point out that the “Wright” in the name comes from those brothers in North Carolina shown below having a great day out in Kitty Hawk!
Obviously Curtiss-Wright has changed a lot since its founding in 1929 and they are now on the leading edge of technology so it was great to talk with David Jedynak, CTO of the Curtiss-Wright COTS (commercial off the shelf) unit.
The whole reason we are taking a look at the ARM based single board computer market is that it has changed dramatically in the last 2 years but David was way ahead of the curve. Back in June of 2010 when David joined Curtiss-Wright he wrote this visionary article titled: A call to arms, auto industry quality standards provide path to SWaP-C reduction. Back then anyone reading David’s article may have thought it frivolous that ARM processors which were doing so well in the mobile market would make an impact in the entrenched Aerospace market. As it turns out David’s vision came true and Curtiss-Wright were first to market with an ARM based board in May of 2014, the VPX3-1701, a 3U VPX with an ARM Cortex-A7 core processor.
The board is based on the Freescale Layerscape architecture which is a bridge between earlier architectures and ARM making it pin compatible with all Curtiss Wright VPX boards (datasheet here).
So it took 4 years from David’s visionary article to the first ARM based VPX board to come to market and it was from his team. To me this is a perfect example of what great CTOs do, they look out into the future a few years and make bets on the technology the market will need. So if you are (or aspire to be) a CTO in the embedded market today what technology trend would you bet on to be a game changer in 4 years’ time? Your job might just depend on that bet!
Getting back to David's key insight from 2010 we need to understand what the acronym SWaP-C means in the market. Specifically Size, Weight and Power, plus Cost. The Aerospace market is in some ways more driven by new technology than the commercial market because the world’s global travel and security needs change so rapidly (think low cost airlines and drones for example). David told me that the increasing levels of I/O integration in ARM based SoCs directly benefited the Aerospace market which had relied on a processor board plus I/O carrier card philosophy and it was only a matter of time before highly integrated ARM SoCs entered the market.
Aerospace systems tend to have long lifespans and to some extent this may explain why it’s taken so long for ARM SoCs to become a design option. David said once a completely new system is being designed there is no need to reuse legacy software and now that all the major RTOS vendors and Linux distributions run on ARM the door is open for the ARM SWaP-C advantage to get traction. The Aerospace market is also very conservative and David thinks that the broader recognition of ARM processors entering markets like supercomputing (Raspberry Pi based Beowulf supercomputer cluster for example) gave design teams a reason to take a hard look at ARM. Another factor is that new engineers and designers entering the business are very familiar with development boards based on ARM like the TI Beagleboard and of course the Raspberry Pi (Chris Rommel of VDC Research also made this exact point).
It’s a given that Aerospace applications are hard on the electronics so various board form factors have been created over the years to mount the systems meaning change comes slowly to this market. David thinks that the legacy form factors might have been an impediment to ARM based SoCs being used because the design philosophy was different and new SoCs integrate so many more functions. This is an intriguing twist; with higher levels of integration, does the Aerospace market need a new board form factor?
Curtiss-Wright were first to the COTS VPX market in 2014 with an ARM based solution and it’s going to be fascinating to watch how this market embraces ARM and builds systems for global aerospace and defense markets. You can read about the growing world of ARM based embedded computing boards here. Did I miss anything?