MISTRAL SOLUTIONS

CEO’s Desk

Dear Customer,

Welcome to another issue of Infowaves. The big news in the industry is that India will acquire Rafale Fighter Aircraft (Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft) from Dassault Aviation for 7.8 Billion Euros. This agreement includes a 50% offset clause under which French companies have to invest that value in India for goods and services. This is the largest-ever offset contract in the history of India and will provide great opportunities for Indian companies like Mistral who have put in years of effort in developing world class technology within the country. We look forward to working with the DRDO, Indian Defense and other system integrators to realize this opportunity.

In this newsletter, we introduce Curtiss-Wright’s Parvus DuraCOR 80-42, a Rugged, COTS, tactical mission computer subsystem optimally designed for size, weight and power (SWaP) - sensitive applications.

Through this newsletter, we endeavor to introduce to you latest cutting-edge technologies and solutions that are gaining interest and popularity worldwide. I hope you will find the white papers on ‘HPEC: High Availability by Design’ from Curtiss-Wright and ‘Data Model Considerations’ from RTI useful. Ramanan JV, VP-Defense (SED) shares with you his expertise in Thermal Management in the first series of article on the same topic.

Mistral successfully built and delivered Liquid-cooled Signal Processing units for Phased-Array RADARs and synchronised, multi-channel Acquisition and signal processing systems for SONAR applications. We hope that these solutions will contribute to India taking giant steps in its endeavour towards indigenization.

We look forward to your feedback or suggestions.

Sincerely,

signature
Mujahid Alam

New Products

Parvus DuraCOR 80-42 - Rugged Modular Mission Computer from Curtiss-Wright

The Parvus DuraCOR 80-42 is a rugged Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) tactical mission computer subsystem based on a quad-core (8-thread), 5th gen Intel Core i7 (Broadwell) processor with PCI Express (PCIe) Mini Card slots and a PCIe/104 bus architecture to support platform-specific add-on I/O modules. Optimally designed for size, weight, and power (SWaP)-sensitive mobile, airborne, ground, manned/unmanned vehicle and sensor applications, the DuraCOR 80-42 combines powerful graphics and multi-core processing with ultra-reliable mechanical robustness and modular I/O expansion capabilities for demanding civil and military platforms.

Featuring an integrated Intel Iris Pro Graphics GPU, the unit provides OpenGL support for graphics-intensive applications, along with a 40-core GPGPU delivering up to 640 GFLOPS of performance with OpenCL support for data processing-intensive applications. The unit has qual testing pending to extreme MIL-STD-810G, MIL-STD-461G, MIL-STD-1275D, MIL-STD-704F and RTCA/DO-160G conditions for environmental, power and EMI compliance.Read More..

Adhoc Handheld Mesh Radio (UHF/2.4GHz) from Maxtech

When teams work together in critical, tactical, and emergency situations, they need to communicate with one another quickly and easily – without interruption and regardless of their physical surroundings. The Adhoc Handheld Mesh Radio provides a unique software upgradeable solution that creates a dynamic, self-forming, and self-healing network to enable voice and data transmission on the move. A patented algorithm is used to ensure superior voice quality and high data throughput for indoor and outdoor operations, without the need for GPS synchronization.

It ensures multi-hop voice and data relaying to create a reliable and robust network over large distances. Covering the 225-470 MHz frequency range, this multiband radio provides a variety of waveforms from 25 KHz narrowband waveforms (QPSK), and including middle band 384 KHz (GMSK) waveform and wideband 1.5 MHz (GMSK) waveform. It also includes a built-in GPS which provides situational awareness information to command and control applications, or other management systems. The transmitted voice and data is highly secure due to a multi-layer security method that includes a proprietary air protocol and AES 128 encryption. Read More..

FPGA and Signal Processing Services from Mistral

Defense electronics requirements are expanding the envelopes of performance with high-speed serial IOs, dedicated DSP capabilities and faster memories interfaces. Current generation FPGAs address these aspects and are gaining the center stage in many aerospace and defense applications like RADAR Data Acquisition and processing, TRMs, Beam forming, Target Simulation, ECM, Signal Intelligence, Communication Intelligence, Telemetry, etc. FPGAs also feature high-speed serial interfaces like Serial RapidIO (SRIO), PCI Express (PCIe), InfiniBand, Gigabit Ethernet, 10 GigE etc, which are gaining wider acceptance and use in emerging aerospace and defense applications. Current generation FPGAs also come in three-dimensional silicon, which use stacked silicon Interconnect, leading to high density and high performance FPGAs. Xilinx Ultrascale and Ultrascale+ belong to this league.

Mistral has a strong design-to-deployment capability for FPGA and Signal Processing to complement its core strength of designing complete Defense subsystems. Read More..

Articles

HPEC: High Availability by Design – White Paper from Curtiss-Wright

A fault tolerant system must have the ability to continue processing data even when a hardware failure occurs. This is accomplished by building duplicate hardware of all critical components of the system, eliminating single points of failure such as the processors and power supplies. When a component fails, the software must be able to detect the failure and handle the switching of the hardware and re-routing of the data flow. As the next generation of embedded defense systems become even more complex with more computational power, memory, data, and speed, the problem of designing effective fault tolerant systems also becomes more difficult. The High Performance Computing (HPC) world has developed a set of mature, proven methodologies and tools to support High Availability (HA) clusters. By definition, availability refers to a level of service provided by applications, services, or systems. Highly available systems have minimal downtime, whether planned or unplanned.Read More..

Data Model Considerations for Radar Systems - Whitepaper from RTI

The market demands that today’s radar systems be designed to keep up with a rapidly changing threat environment, adapt to new technologies, and reflect the realities of smaller development budgets. This white paper show cases why radar systems developers are adopting standards-based communications technologies and data-centric architectures that help meet these challenging requirements. The issues discussed relate to the two different approaches that are commonly used for constructing scalable, open radar systems:

Integrating radar functions into a single standards-based radar system - A plug-and-play platform enables the use of devices and subsystems from multiple vendors. It also reduces redundancy by sharing common processing tasks across systems.

Networking simple sensors and systems together - The linked platforms share data in real time using open standards. This approach also enables operational capabilities that standalone systems lack. Read More..

Thermal Management for Embedded Systems (Part 1) – An Article from Mistral

The Physics of thermal management, takes us to analytical and statistical methods where models of bodies or systems are characterized based on their material composition, their state in defined conditions inclusive of their physical characteristics, their inherent conductive or resistive (electrical) characteristics, their energy states, etc. The models created are used for analysis of the behavior of the said bodies or systems, with a definition of boundary condition of operations.

The result of such an analysis received through computer simulations, leads to a theoretical understanding of the operation of the body or system before they are taken to the drawing table and progressively to the production floor. The whole process viz., defining the boundary of operations or environmental conditions, characterization of the body or system and its behavior, mathematically modeling the phenomenon inclusive of the environmental conditions and the system characteristics, is more commonly referred to as Thermal Analysis in the embedded world.

Thermal analysis is therefore an essential exercise (if not mandatory) for the creation of predictable, reliable and successful products and systems.Read More..

News & Events

Signal Processing Units Supplied by Mistral

We are pleased to inform you that Mistral has successfully built and delivered multiple Signal Processing units for RADAR and SONAR applications. The RADAR Signal Processing solutions consist of two Liquid Cooled system for Phased Array RADAR and four Signal Processing Units with integrated RADAR controller and Data processor. Mistral also delivered synchronised, multi-channel Front-end Data Acquisition and signal processing systems for SONAR applications. We are extremely excited to be part of these solutions that will contribute to India taking giant steps in its endeavour towards indigenization. We wish DRDO a successful execution of these projects.

Send your feedback to mktg@mistralsolutions.com. Catch up on the latest in embedded, networking and communication solutions. Log on to www.mistralsolutions.com.

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