AN ONBOARD PROCESSOR FOR FLIGHT TEST DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEMS

Abstract

Today’s flight test programs are experiencing increasing demands for a greater number of high-rate digital parameters, competition for spectrum space, and a need for operational flexibility in flight test instrumentation. These demands must be met while meeting schedule and budget constraints. To address these various needs, the Boeing Integrated Defense System (IDS) Flight Test Instrumentation group in St. Louis has developed an onboard processing capability for use with airborne instrumentation data collection systems. This includes a first-generation Onboard Processor (OBP) which has been successfully used on the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet flight test program for four years, and which provides a throughput of 5 Mbytes/s and a processing capability of 480 Mflops (floating-point operations per second). Boeing IDS Flight Test is also currently developing a second generation OBP which features greatly enhanced input and output flexibility and algorithm programmability, and is targeted to provide a throughput of 160 Mbytes/s with a processing capability of 16 Gflops. This paper describes these onboard processing capabilities and their benefits.