The U. S. Air Forces new F22 Raptor advanced tactical fighter is finally preparing to move into production after more than a decade of development. Raptor is a family of cryogenic, methanefueled rocket engines under development by SpaceX. The engines are powered by densified liquid methane and liquid oxygen LOX. Here you can find out what is happening in the world of Phoenix, including new models, flying sites and program updates. F 2. 2 avionics designers rely on obsolescent electronics, but plan for future upgrades. By J. R. Wilson. The U. S. Air Forces new F 2. Raptor advanced tactical fighter is finally preparing to move into production after more than a decade of development. In the process its avionics architecture has passed through at least three cycles of obsolescence and relies on an Intel microprocessor the i. MX that went out of production four years ago. There is nothing unusual about that, of course the time frame for developing, testing, and producing a new military aircraft far exceeds the confines of Moores Law, as well as the confines of commercial development, production, and eventual obsolescence of microprocessors. Raptor Reliability Simulation Software: Software Free Download' title='Raptor Reliability Simulation Software: Software Free Download' />For the F 2. Power. PC processor already is on the drawing board, beginning with Lot 5 production of the aircraft around 2. However, the aircrafts builders must freeze the jets design baseline at the end of this year, which means a fifth generation G 5 chip, at best, which will undoubtedly have long passed its own moment of obsolescence by 2. The avionics suite is the responsibility of engineers at the Boeing Military Aircraft Missiles Systems in Seattle, with Mike Harris as avionics production team leader. The overall avionics production team manager is Tom Mc. Dermott of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Marietta, Ga. The two companies team with Pratt Whitney in East Hartford, Conn., to produce the F 2. F 1. 5 as the Air Forces primary air superiority jet fighter. The F 2. 2s integrated avionics suite features extensive use of very high speed integrated circuit VHSIC technology, common modules, and high speed data buses to manage its sensors. This approach frees the pilot to concentrate on his mission. The technologies applied to that task include a Common Integrated Processor CIP, the systems brain, which has been described as having the equivalent power of two Cray supercomputers shared low observable antennas Ada software expert systems advanced data fusion cockpit displays integrated electronic warfare system INEWS technology integrated communications, navigation and identification CNI avionics technology and optical fiber data transmission. Kilauea Mount Etna Mount Yasur Mount Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira Piton de la Fournaise Erta Ale. Shared legacy Along with the U. S. Armys RAH 6. Comanche scout attack helicopter and the still in development Joint Strike Fighter JSF, the F 2. Wheatus Discography'>Wheatus Discography. Originally, it was to have shared much of its avionics technology with the Comanche under standards established in the late 1. Joint Integrated Avionics Working Group JIAWG. That included a standard backplane interface, a test and maintenance interface, and two external fiber optic serial databuses a high speed databus and a sensor data distribution network. Native AdvertisementAll of those initially were common with the Comanche, but the helicopter has since moved on, Mc. Dermott says. Were using that baseline today. We intend to carry that baseline out through at least production Lot 4, through about 2. Congress. Right now the F 2. Mc. Dermott says. In the future, a combination of DMS diminishing manufacturing sources and trying to be more compatible with other programs will bring us to a more commercial architecture. What will really do that is if we get a new derivative of the aircraft in the program, such as an air to ground version. Right now we are basically an A model throughout the entire production run and funding is capped. But if there is a new version, as with the F 1. E, that probably would be a big driver to bring up the COTS content. Lot 1 production is to begin this year and run through 2. To keep that configuration stable for the past 1. They made several bridge buys to procure enough components for production and spares including the central microprocessor until the next logical redesign point for each subsystem. In addition to the Intel i. MX based multiprocessor a cluster of 3. F 2. 2 unique signal processor from Raytheon derived from the radar processor on the F 1. That signal processing element does around 2. Mc. Dermott says. The i. 96. 0 is about 3. What we get in the end is about one billion instructions per second for data processing and about 3 billion per second for signal processing. Raptor Reliability Simulation Software: Software Free Download' title='Raptor Reliability Simulation Software: Software Free Download' />It was considered to have plenty of margin when we set that baseline in 1. Its a modular system, so we can increase capacity by adding more modules to the box. But right now we havent identified any functions to put on the airplane that it cant handle. When the time comes, designers say they expect to replace the signal processor with a Power. PC using Alti. Vec technology, Motorolas high performance vector parallel processing expansion to the Power. PC RISC processor architecture. Alti. Vec adds a 1. Power. PCs existing integer and floating point units to provide highly parallel operations, as many as 1. Drivers Licence Barcode Format Template here. It really depends on what the overall change plans for the aircraft are and what funding is available, but eventually, I imagine we will go that way, Mc. Dermott says. Optical fiber interconnects Most of the aircrafts box to box interfaces are fiber optic. From the sensors to the common integrated processors is a point to point integrated fiber optic link, very wide band, which is quite fast and easily takes care of any bandwidth problems we might have for those sensors, both in terms of speed and range, says Boeings Harris. That was designed up front quite well with plenty of bandwidth. In terms of studying what future F 2. Rapid. IO and Infini. Band standards, but we really dont have a requirement right now to go that way. The air to air mission requires some throughputs and speed within the processors and signal processors to handle the sensors, but not much different from the requirements for the F 1. E, except it is a lot newer and a lot easier to handle the requirement, Harris continues. The same is true for the Super Hornet. Despite the advance technology aboard the aircraft, future growth is still an important consideration. While the F 2. 2 already has two common integrated processors, it also was designed with space for a third, which has not been used yet. Im sure that extra space was put in to handle future derivative missions beyond the air to air requirements, Harris says. While the Comanche helicopter has diverged from the original goal of commonality, one area in which the F 2. Kaiser Electronics in San Jose, Calif., now a part of Rockwell Collins. If there is any backward compatibility or commonality between airplanes, it would be in that area, says Harris. The FA1. 8 EF Super Hornet also uses the Kaiser flat panel displays they are different sizes, but the technology and most of the circuitry is the same. The F 2. Super Hornet has a couple of 6 by 6s and an 8 by 8 or 8 by 6 planned for the future. The technology has grown now such that the size of the display is irrelevant, Harris explains. You get a lot of the efficiencies in having the same kind of display without forcing all cockpits to use the same size. Ten years ago the simple solution was to gain efficiencies by making all displays the same size, but thats not necessarily desirable today. Flat panels were expensive and hard to make and customized back then. That is no longer the case.