DATA ACQUISITION
FLEXIBLE AND SCALABLE
HIGH-SPEED DATA ACQUISITION
The latest generation of recorders provide an easier way
to meet future flight test instrumentation requirements
// MARC FABER AND JOHNNY PAPPAS
Airborne platforms for commercial and
defense applications are currently in
transition from an epoch where the
comprehensive set of analog sensors and
digital data busses being monitored and
recorded were relatively low bit rate, to a
new era where high speed avionic system
interfaces are becoming prevalent.
Today, recording and instrumentation
systems for airborne mobile platforms
supporting development testing and
evaluation (DT) and operational testing
and evaluation (OT) must be flexible and
scalable. They must support both the low
bit rate legacy digital data buses mentioned
above, such as MIL-STD-1553, ARINC 429,
Gigabit Ethernet, and high speed
synchronous or asynchronous interfaces
now being designed into a wide range of
avionic systems. High speed Ethernet
interfaces are becoming prevalent.
BANDWIDTH INCREASES
Avionics systems are experiencing a
replacement of lower speed digital
interfaces and are moving to high speed
interconnected avionic systems.
Commercial off the shelf (COTS) serial
technology such as 10 and 40 Gigabit
Ethernet chipsets to endure the rugged
environment of airborne platforms are
readily available. Multi-lane Ethernet has
evolved from 1Gb/s to 10/ 40Gb/s, and we
can expect to support 100Gb/s soon. In
some cases, the increase in data rate was
solely intended to reduce latency for closed
loop systems. For other systems, there has
been a significant data bloom for imagery,
radar, and data rate increases due to the
functional advancement of the avionics
systems. It is easy to envision we will soon
be faced with monitoring terabit Ethernet
and petabyte storage capacities.
One thing that has not increased is the
amount of space available for the
installation of instrumentation. The
available area for test system hardware has
decreased in a lot of cases. Sometimes it is
not possible to instrument a wing and the
only available method to monitor
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phenomena such as wing flutter is using
imagery versus transducers such as
accelerometers and strain gages.
AVIONICS UPGRADE TESTING
Typically, an aircraft upgrade does not
require a comprehensive avionics upgrade.
An upgrade often only replaces a subset of
the avionics. It is very desirable to use
existing instrumentation to monitor the
legacy avionics and only add an acquisition
component, versus completely remove the
existing instrumentation and do a
complete new test suite install.
Zodiac Data Systems, now a subsidiary
of Safran, is the largest worldwide provider
for instrumentation and recording
systems. No other provider has a larger
installed base of flexible and modular
instrumentation and recording platforms
utilized for DT and OT testing on both
military and commercial aircraft for
rugged environments
Over two years ago, Zodiac Data Systems
started a design effort to develop an
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