SPECIAL FEATURE
Barriers Fall Between Development and Deployed Systems To help speed and smooth the journey from development to deployment, board and box-level vendors have rolled out a variety of solutions that link the two phases. Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
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ow that defense budgets and schedules are both tighter than ever the stakes are raised for military system designers get from development phase to deployment phase as quickly and as smoothly as possible. An ability to do so can make or break the chances of a contract win—especially when complete working demos are often the requirement. To help the situation a number of box-level system developers have crafted development systems designed specifically to be aligned with the all the same key aspects of the final deployed system. Starting with VPX, the mix of these system solutions has broadened to other standard architectures—like CompactPCI and FMC. Board-level carriers have also emerged to accomplish the same things. Meanwhile a variety of more application-specific development systems have joined the game.
Marrying Development and Deployment For its part Extreme Engineering Solutions (X-ES) was among the earliest to marry boxlevel development systems with comparable deployable systems. The company provides development platforms designed to enable developers to start their development quickly with a pre-integrated system. Since many VPX systems are deployed, X-ES provides development platforms that accept conduction-cooled boards in an air-cooled lab chassis. Rear Transition Modules (RTMs) can be used to allow developers to quickly and easily prototype system I/O.
COTS Journal | August 2016
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