Developing a stable architecture for interfacing aircraft to commercial personal computers

The intent of this paper is to introduce an entirely new and exciting adventure in software and hardware in which the concept of commercial PC products are utilized to interface with military and commercial aircraft. The life cycle problem 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 is presented. A new developmental architecture is 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 are described to demonstrate the new architecture. The relative performance of the architecture has been evaluated and refined by multiple implementations. These are described and future implementations examined.