Curtis-Wright Corp To Evaluate COTS Airborne Radar Signal Processing For USAF

Curtiss-Wright Corp announced today that it has been contracted to assess the capability of cost effective commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software to perform airborne radar signal processing for the US Air Force organized Next Generation Radar evaluation program.

This assessment is being performed at Curtiss-Wright by running and optimizing SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and GMTI (Ground Moving Target Indicator) benchmarks on Curtiss-Wright COTS hardware solutions.  These benchmarks, which were provided by the US Air Force, leverage advances in commercial high performance computing (HPC) software, such as OpenCL, VSIPL, FFTW, and MPI.

Under the program, Curtiss-Wright and a select group of COTS vendors will each benchmark their proposed multiprocessor High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) Radar processing architecture based on specifications and requirements provided by the US Air Force.

“Using today’s high performance open architecture hardware, it’s now possible to design whole new classes of rugged deployed HPEC solutions that deliver all of the proven cost savings and long lifecycle benefits of COTS technology while elevating radar processing performance to levels never before achievable,” Lynn Bamford, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Defense Solutions said.

Under the program, Curtiss-Wright will benchmark and optimize its High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC)-based radar processing system design. The Curtiss-Wright design is based on the company’s Fabric40 rugged OpenVPX board and chassis products that deliver the industry’s first complete end-to-end system approach for integrating the 40 Gbps high-speed fabrics  into aerospace and defense HPEC applications.

Curtiss-Wright Fabric40 system elements provide a complete system solution, including single board computers (SBC), DSP and FPGA engines, GPU processors, network switches and backplanes.