Advanced Reconfigurable Communications, Fault-Tolerant Avionics

Existing and emerging combat, support, and commercial aircraft and rotorcraft will continue to incorporate new sensors, data processors, and related systems that will make the complex, mostly federated avionics systems of the 70’s through 90’s look like antiques. As the data processing, multi-sensor fusion, and automatic operations continue to burden the conventional avionics infrastructures, new and innovative architectures and subsystems will be needed to meet the high-bandwidth, low-latency, and other criteria of future avionics systems. Implicit in such future systems will be the requirement for fault-tolerance and reconfiguration in the presence of faults. The tremendous growth in the telecommunications infrastructure has led to a series of technologies and devices that provide the basis for unique subsystems that can implement such advanced, reconfigurable, fault-tolerant avionics systems. At Systran Corp., we are developing a data communications subsystem that can realize the vision of such avionics systems. The commercial telecommunications world talks about five nine’s operation. This translates to about 5 minutes downtime a year. Their fault tolerant systems can be quickly repaired with hot swap boards and a technician. In the avionics world it’s hard to have a technician replace a board when the vehicle is on a mission at 10,000 feet. Instead, a new subsystem, called the JANUS fault tolerant communication device, provides a Fibre Channel interface incorporating a switch matrix to allow rerouting around faults within the external data communication system. The JANUS board is a specialized multiple channel, Fibre-Channel interface operating at 2 Gigabits/sec on each channel. This paper will discuss the need for reconfigurable, fault-tolerant avionics systems and our vision for how JANUS Card-like products help achieve this goal.