Interfacing aircraft to commercial personal computers

The focus of this paper is the concept of utilizing commercial PC products and interfacing them to military and commercial aircraft. The problem of the life cycle of the different products is examined from multiple viewpoints. Existing products are described, architecture for each implementation is derived, and their strengths and weaknesses are explored. Finally an attempt to define the root causes for the problem of implementation of interface architectures in this environment will be presented. A new developmental architecture will be introduced. This architecture is designed to maintain the strengths of the traditional architectures and eliminate some of the weaknesses and inefficiencies. A series of hardware/software co-development projects will be described to demonstrate the new architecture. The relative performance of the architecture has been evaluated and refined by multiple implementations. These will be described and future implementations examined.