Accelerating System Upgrades with EDASTAR!SM

Abstract

Sustaining the decisive technology superiority of America’s military systems requires frequent upgrade of aging and in many cases obsoletes electronic components during the long system life cycles. The upgrade process is lengthy compared to the pace of rapidly evolving commercial technologies and therefore creates a constantly growing “technology gap” between deployed military technologies and commercially available technologies. Consider the fact that a major system upgrade may take as long as eight years; whereas a new Pentium microprocessor with twice the processing power as its predecessor becomes available every 18 months. EDAptive Computing’s innovative EDASTAR! tool suite and EDAptive methodology addresses the technology gap problem by significantly shortening the upgrade time for complex electronics systems. EDASTAR! also provides substantial cost savings by reducing the time and effort it takes to verify an upgrade and by eliminating/reducing the number of design iterations. This is a significant benefit as the verification activity can take as much as 50-70% of the total upgrade time & effort using current methodology. This paper will describe the EDASTAR! tool suite and EDAptive methodology and provide early results of its application to the problem of recertifying replacement hardware for obsolete parts. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND The lifetime of military systems dwarfs that of commercial computer and electronic systems. Military systems measure their lifetime in decades; computer systems and consumer electronics (such as cell phones) in months, sometimes literally in weeks. To gain the maximum advantage of the increasing capability of commercial electronics and its rapid advancement, military systems are becoming increasingly depending on commercial and commercial derivative components to provide the most advanced capabilities to our warfighters. While this shift in sourcing increases the features and capabilities of our military systems, it greatly exacerbates the problem of obsolete parts. Developers of current generation avionics systems find themselves confronted with obsolescence issues early in the development cycle, often even before the first unit can be fielded. The implications of this technology gap between development of military and commercial systems is illustrated in Figure 1. Military development and upgrade cycles (from conception to fielding) can take five to ten years or longer. Given a processor lifetime that is eighteen months or less, this means that the technology baseline of military systems is lagging further and further behind its commercial counterpart. Even the latest military systems, such as the Air Force F/A-22 Raptor depend upon processors that are already regarded as obsolete and in some cases no longer available commercially. The same gap is found in other components that have a commercial counterpart, e.g., memory, I/O devices, disks, and even basic systems such as power supplies. The obvious solution to this technology gap is to synchronize the upgrade path of the military system components with the upgrade path of its commercial counterparts. If military development and upgrade cycles can be reduced from five years or longer to two years or less, then military systems can always take advantage of the best current technology, resulting in Accelerating Change in 32-Bit processors ...