Impact of Very High Performance Integrated Circuits on Radar, Guidance and Avionics Systems

摘要

The Avionics Panel of AGARD has recognized the major importance of VLSI integrated circuits to military systems, particularly those using sensors outputting high information rates requiring responses in real time. The greatly increased speed and complexity of information processing possible with reduced size and power consumption, and eventually cost, seems likely to influence the balance of military power very significantly. However, the technology is one thing. and its efficient exploitation in practical systems quite another. In order to assess progress and establish the best way forward this meeting reviewed the state of the art, the likely future capability and how it may best be attained in several key areas. The central integrated circuit technologies, MOS and bipolar silicon and gallium arsenide, were reviewed, together with design methods for high complexity fast chips. The ways in which the chips could and should be organized were then examined, leading on to current achievements at the component and subsystem levels. The chief intent of the meeting was to assess the impact of VLSI on systems. This was approached by next considering ways in which parallelism, or concurrent processing, can be efficiently exploited. This was widely regarded as essential in order to keep busy the large number of logic gates becoming available (more than 1 million in a few tens of chips). The subject is relatively new and many alternative hardware/software architectural strategies are still being researched in order to determine the best options. Finally, few lessons already learnt from experience with missile, radar and avionic systems were pondered upon. (Author)