Advanced avionics for military needs

The military customer of today is faced with escalating costs and inadequate reliability and availability of avionic systems. The evolution of increasingly sophisticated electronics has offered the military unimaginable increases in processing power and functional capability. Consequently, avionics is now a major driver in air vehicle design, accounting for around 40% of the acquisition cost of a modern combat aircraft. However, in addition to higher acquisition costs the life-cycle costs and logistics support problems of avionic systems have also increased. Reductions in technology cost, weight and volume have been far outweighed by the hunger of the military customer for increased numbers of complex operational functions. These issues are examined and the current ideas for reversing these trends, based on modular architectures, are presented