Test program offload using CRATE

It is difficult to perfectly align the lifecycles of military systems with the common test platforms that support them. Many military systems outlive their designated test platform and require rehosting on a newer test platform. This rehosting effort frequently requires design of a new test platform and test program set. The rehosting process is expensive, and the recurrent nature of this problem requires a solution. The U.S. Navy is presently facing a rehost effort with two common testers deployed in the 1980s, the CAT and RADCOM. Obsolescence issues with these test stations have driven the Navy to initiate an effort to offload depot-level testing to the CASS test station. The CAT and RADCOM TPS Emulation program (CRATE) is designed to leverage advances in both hardware and software technology to reuse existing CAT and RADCOM test programs and adapter hardware on the CASS, drastically reducing the cost of rehost and preserve the extremely large TPS investment. This paper presents details on the hardware and software concepts implemented in the CRATE design.