The answer today is “yes”, but it took a while for the military to get there. And if go back as recently as 5 or 6 years ago, the military considered switch fabrics to be outside their comfort zone. Military systems have such long development cycles, followed by even longer deployment cycles. So the idea of migrating to a computing scheme that requires a backplane change wasn’t all that welcome. Also remember that, in the early days of switched fabrics, there were probably 20 difference fabrics to choose from. It took a while for the general computing and embedded market to weed out which of those would be winners.

Fast forward to today, and now we have good number of embedded computing form factors and system architectures that incorporate switch fabrics—VPX, VXS, ATCA, MicroTCA, AMC, XMC, PC/104-Express to name the leading examples. Military applications that rely most heavily on a dense amount of computing muscle—including radar, SIGINT, image processing and so—need not just fast computing muscle, but also a means to move data on and off and in between processors, and that means switch fabrics. So those applications have been the “early adopters” but beyond that serial fabric interconnects—PCI Express in particular—are now fundamental to any kind of computing or embedded computing. So as existing military systems upgrade and refresh technology, more often than not there’s going to be pressure to shift from parallel bus architecture like VME or CompactPCI to a fabric-based system. The shift won’t happen over night, of course but that’s the direction things are heading.

Submitted by Jeff Child on June 24, 2009