News Release from: General Micro Systems
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 18 May 2005

New initiative to aid military upgrades

This week at the Military Embedded Electronics Computing Conference, General Micro Systems announced its new 'Computing Engine' initiative.

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This week at the Military Embedded Electronics Computing Conference, General Micro Systems announced its new 'Computing Engine' initiative. The new initiative addresses one of the most vexing technology issues in the defence industry, which is how to give military customers a way to upgrade their processor, memory and multimedia technology without sacrificing system interface, I/O, storage, and networking components that typically remain constant over the life of the system. GMS's Computing Engine solves this age-old problem by providing a field-upgradeable single-board embedded computing platform that extends the useful life of industrial control, defence and communications systems by five to ten years or more.

The Computing Engine accomplishes this by employing a modular architecture that locates the core processor, memory, and graphics subsystem on a field-replaceable module that plugs into the carrier card (VMEbus, CPCI, custom carrier, etc).

With the Computing Engine, defence OEMs need not perform forklift upgrades in order to retool and exploit new CPU, memory, and graphics technology.

They simply plug in a new Computing Engine module.

This modular approach greatly extends the useful life of embedded systems and significantly reduces the cost of upgrades, while enabling system designers to preserve their investment in system interfaces, I/O, networking and other components that typically remain unchanged over the life of the system.

'The Computing Engine gives defence OEMs the best of both worlds', said Ben Sharfi, CEO of General Micro Systems.

'Now, they can protect their investment in long-life, application specific system interface, I/O, mass storage and networking technology while still taking advantage of the latest CPU, memory, and multimedia enhancements'.

'The Computing Engine turns the mezzanine concept on its head', added Sharfi.

'Traditionally, mezzanines have been used to add application-specific I/O functionality, with the generic CPU, memory, and multimedia subsystem residing on the carrier card'.

'The Computing Engine flips this around, using the baseboard to house static application-specific I/O and system interfaces, and the mezzanine module to implement CPU, memory and multimedia components that are most likely to change over the life of the application'.

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