The EAC-CPCI-3838/3910 is a Compact PCI card is designed to meet and exceed the requirements specified in RQ-J-931-M-0003 for the EFABus Interface in the Enhanced Attack Computer (EAC) for the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft.

The card contains three independent processor sections. Two of these sections are virtually identical. The first handles the low speed 3838 terminal, whilst the second controls the high speed 3910 terminal. These two identical processor sections each use a Texas Instruments SMJ320C6203 DSP processor. This family of processors can run at speeds of up to 300Mhz, providing a peak performance of 2400MIPS. The following processor option is planned.

For many applications, these DSP processors contain sufficient internal data memory to hold the required structures for control of both the 3838 and 3910 bus. However, if additional memory is required, each processor may have an additional 16M Bytes of high speed SDRAM fitted. This memory is fully visible to the third, Application Specific Processor (ASP) via an onboard local bus (No PCI accesses are required to for this). Additionally, up to 1Meg bytes of FLASH EPROM is available to each processor. This contains the boot code and application firmware for the terminal processors.

The third processor section on the card is an Application Specific Processor (ASP) which is provided solely for the user to write embedded code to control the terminal. This allows the card to work in a completely stand alone mode, without the need for any host processor intervention. The ASP is a Motorola PowerPC MPC740, as specified in RQ-J-931-M-0003. It has its own dedicated 32Mbytes of fast SDRAM, and 1Mbyte of FLASH EPROM for boot code and user code storage. The ASP can access the two terminal processors memory via an onboard local bus (No PCI accesses are required to for this).

Connection between the ASP and the host is performed over a PCI 2.1 compatible bus. The MPC107 PCI interface chip from Motorola has been chosen because of its virtually glueless interface with the PowerPC. The MPC107 supports universal mode 5V or 3V3 signalling at up to 100Mhz and 32bits wide. It can operate in master and target mode, and also contains 2 DMA controllers for transferring data to and from the PCI bus at rates in excess of 264 MB/sec (on a 66 Mhz capable bus)

All the circuitry required to generate and receive the 3838 and 3910 bus protocols is contained within a single Xilinx FPGA device. Xilinx are an accredited QML supplier of military specification components. The device is infinitely reprogrammable, and reads its configuration information from an onboard FLASH EPROM at power up. This means that both the onboard software and the onboard Xilinx ‘hardware’ can be upgraded to a users requirements without any actual hardware modifications. This device is also used to implement all the Discrete and Interrupt signals specified in RQ-J-931-M-0003.All 3838, 3910 and Discrete input and outputs are effected via the PCI J2 connector to minimise wiring constraints within the EAC. However, this precludes the use of PCI 64 Bit transfers.

This card is specifically designed to meet and exceed the requirements specified in RQ-J-931-M-0003 for the EFABus Interface in the Enhanced Attack Computer (EAC) for the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft. Therefore, it is only available in a full military (Mil-Std-883C Class B) form. However, to support the current trend towards Commercial Of The Shelf (COTS) solutions in military designs, the two terminal processor sections of this card are 100% compatible with the ATT-CPCI-3838/3910 card, also available from ATT Avionics. This card is available in Commercial and Industrial grades, thus offering a much lower cost card for development. Therefore systems can be designed and developed using inexpensive commercial cards, followed by a low risk switch to the full Mil-Spec, but functionally similar card for production systems.