When most of us travel by plane, we don’t usually think about how exactly we’re getting off the ground. We may vaguely remember something about the science of how planes get up in the air or recall some physics lesson from years ago, but we don’t often a factor in the sophisticated technologies that are required to pilot an aircraft. In fact, it’s unlikely that any plane would ever get off the ground or at least operate properly without the complex avionics technologies that have been developed in recent years. From data buses to software products, a lot of tech goes into getting those wheels off the ground and landing safely.
A Brief History
MIL-STD-1553 is military standard published in 1973 by the United States Department of Defense and originally used as a U.S. Air Force standard. The 1553 test defines the mechanical, electrical, and functional characteristics of a serial data bus. It was designed for military avionics but has since been used in spacecraft on-board data handling subsystems for both the military and civil sectors.
A “Legacy Technology”
The 1553 test is an undisputed, tried and true interface in the avionics world, and can be found in the most modern of aircraft, include the F-35. It uses traditional avionics architectures and has three main circuits – a protocol engine (usually and FPGA or microprocessor to allow for network protocol off-load processing), a PCI backplane connection to a computer, and some sort of pseudo dual-port RAM to the PE, as well as backplane to give real-time access to the user’s application. This application then reads and writes to data buffers via backplane memory mapping. Typical read/write speeds are between 500-2000 ns for a single word to or from the application memory and interface card.
The Future
As the modern avionics industry continues to grow and systems designs, advance, it will become crucial to adapt 1553 networks to Ethernet-centric topology. Certain avionics appliances, like the eNet-153, can help to fulfill this requirement. It will become increasingly important to move towards a thin-server design, which can maximize the portability of the application and increase overall data application performance. These next generation appliances will help provide flexibility in the system design topologies, as well as reducing both initial and recurring costs.
