Small-form-factor computer for avionics market

Product

February 06, 2017

John McHale

Editorial Director

Military Embedded Systems

Alligator Designs? rugged small-form-factor (SFF) computer, called the Falcon II, is designed to be configurable and expandable using modules with standard electrical and connector interfaces. It is tailored for the avionics, military, and rugged industrial market. The Falcon II is c...

Alligator Designs’ rugged small-form-factor (SFF) computer, called the Falcon II, is designed to be configurable and expandable using modules with standard electrical and connector interfaces. It is tailored for the avionics, military, and rugged industrial market. The Falcon II is configurable with the Intel Core i7 and Xeon E3, AMD G-Series system on chip (SoC), Intel Atom Bay Trail, and Free scale PowerPC.

The Falcon II is designed to support all I/O typically needed in the targeted applications, including MIL-STD-1553B, ARINC-429, AS-5643 MIL firewire, video graphics, video frame capture, software-defined radio (SDR), RS-232/422/485, Fibre Channel, GigE and 10GigE, analog and discrete signals, and field-programmable gate array (FPGA)/general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) processors. The I/O can be in XMC or MiniPCIe, including AcroPack. Users can also opt for inertial measurement and navigation, GPS, Wi-Fi, cellular modem signals, and multi-drive RAID storage solutions. Alligator’s chassis is intended to use minimum space while optimized to manage heat dissipation. To prevent high NRE costs, the system architecture makes maximum use of standards-based computer, graphics, I/O modules, and connectors. The standardized midplane design supports a mixture of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) module types.