Error-Free Data Acquisition and Archival for High-Bandwidth Military Applications

Acquiring data from sensors, transporting the data, and then archiving it for future reference has changed dramatically over the last few years. The traditional approach of collecting data from an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with a small microprocessor to monitor the slow-changing levels of a signal is for the most part no longer adequate. Today's new advanced military systems now employ complex sensors capable of generating streams of data with rates of 100 megabytes and greater. To transfer this high-speed data from the sensor to a processor without losing signal characteristics, designers now must digitize the data at the sensor. To meet this requirement, designers needed a protocol that would transport the digital data with minimum processing or latency. This problem was pursued by several companies, including Curtiss- Wright, and the result was the ANSI/VITA 17.1-2003 Serial Front Panel Data Port standard (S-FPDP).