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A429-VME
Application Scope
Avionics maintenance, testing, simulation, integration and troubleshooting all require powerful and easy-to-use equipment that provides optimum performance as well as large-scale flexibility. Since its introduction in 1981 the VME Standard has maintained its leadership position in medium to high-end embedded computing. Due to extremely long development and product life cycles in military and aerospace, VME has become the standard especially in these application areas. On the A429VME-I board the demanding real-time requirements of ARINC 429 protocol communications and the handling of the increasing amount of information and data exchanged via ARINC 429 are supported by local processing power and memory resources on both the Motorola MVME162 carrier and each of the ARINC 429 IP modules. Customized carrier firmware allows for extraordinary flexibility and maximum real-time performance.
Features
The A429VME-I IndustryPack® carrier board is an 6U intelligent Motorola MVME162 embedded controller equipped with 4 fully IP standard compatible IP slots. The carrier can be equipped either solely with TechSAT‘s intelligent A429IPM ARINC 429 IP modules or with any other IP module compliant to the IP specification. The most valuable IP feature is this possibility to use any variety of I/O types (even with IP modules from different vendors) on a single board in a single VME slot. Comprehensive interface libraries and drivers for various development environments and operating systems allow easy implementation of embedded applications. The A429VME-I forms the ARINC 429 hardware resource for TechSAT‘s ADS-3000 Avionics Development System.
MVME162 Embedded Controller
The MVME162 is based on the MC68040 or MC68LC040 microprocessor. Various versions of the MVME162 have 4 MB, 8MB or 16 MB of unprotected RAM, 8 KB of SRAM, time of day clock, Ethernet transceiver interface, two serial ports EIA-232 or EIA-422/485, six tick timers, watchdog timer, 1 MB Flash memory and 4 IndustryPack® interfaces.
Intelligent A429IPM
The basic idea behind the IP IndustryPack® concept of the A429IPM is to have an intelligent solution for any kind of backplane, including PCI, cPCI, VME, VXI, PC/104 or ISA. The outstanding feature of the A429IPM is the integrated 20 MHz Siemens C165 Microcontroller with the on-module RAM/EEPROM resources (each 256 kByte). This approach allows shifting all ARINC 429 real-time requirements from any host CPU to the A429IPM ARINC 429 front-end. One microcontroller is responsible for handling all ARINC 429 receive and transmit tasks of 2 Tx and 4 Rx channels autonomously, interfacing with a host application through the intelligent carrier on a functional interface library/DLL level.
Mechanical Outline
The A429VME-I assembly consists of an intelligent double Eurocard VME single board embedded controller with 4 IP slots. The carrier holds up to 4 intelligent ARINC 429 IP modules. The 50 I/O-lines of each of the 4 IP modules are brought out on their own 50-pin flat cable connector.
