Board Doubles ARINC 429 Interfaces for Avionics

NASA Tech Briefs, Jul 2006

Condor Engineering's (Santa Barbara, CA) CEI-430 is a high-density ARINC 429 interface for PC/104-Plus and PCI-104 systems that utilizes FPGA technology to increase the number of ARINC 429 interfaces per board. Configurations also are available to support the flight-data-recorder databus (ARINC 717/573), enabling engineers to integrate flight data into in-flight entertainment systems.

The board integrates up to 24 independent channels into one PC/104-Plus form-factor board. High resolution, time-stamped buffering and filtering are provided for each ARINC 429 receive channel, along with accurate transmission scheduling for transmit channels. IRIG-B receiver/generator support is optional. Condor's Dual-Mode ARINC 717 functionality supports either HBP (Harvard bi-phase) or BPRZ (bi-polar return to zero) across a range of bit-rate/subframe combinations.

Additional features of the CEI-430 include independent, software-programmable data rates and parity, error detection, and automatic transmit channel slew rate adjustment. The CEI-430 offers up to 16 bi-directional avionics-level discrete I/O, up to four bi-directional RS-485 discrete channels, and two megabytes of on-board RAM. The CEI-430 is available in PC/104-Plus (with ISA bus pass-thru) or PCI-104 (no pass-thru) configurations, and uses the PCI bus for all host communications. The CEI-430 is provided with a comprehensive application programming interface and integrated driver support for Windows, VxWorks, and Linux. For Free Info Visit http://info.ims.ca/5785-417