Innovative New Feature Advances 1553 Bus Controller (BC) Protocol Testing for High Reliability Control Systems

Rio Rancho, NM (Alta Wire) – Alta Data Technologies of Rio Rancho New Mexico announced the release of a new “BC Signal Generator Test” feature that advances MIL-STD-1553 Bus Controller (BC) protocol testing. The new feature involves an advanced FPGA trigger mode that starts a flexible signal generator function to reproduce Remote Terminal (RT) responses to command messages. The user has great flexibility to create virtually any signal pattern of varied bit/sync encoding, word length, parity and message length errors to test BC error handling conditions. “For nearly 20 years, engineers did not have a good method of testing BC designs in a similar manner as RT designs per the SAE AS4111 or AS4113 1553 test plans. It was not possible to generate these complex signal patterns with commercial off the shelf interface cards,” says Jake Haddock, Alta’s CTO. He continues, “With this new AltaCore-1553 FPGA release, which is part of our standard product and has been RT Validated by Test Systems Inc., the user can define and transmit virtually any signal pattern in response to a BC command message in a very similar fashion as with AS15531 SAE RT Validation tests. And the best part is the simplicity of the application program interface (API) to setup and generate the pattern – it takes only minutes to setup and run user defined patterns.”

Alta states this new “Trigger on Decode Gap Event” feature is an industry first and is provided with all standard MIL-STD-1553 COTS PCI, PCI Express, PCMCIA/PCCARD, future PCI ExpressCards, PMC, Compact PCI and VPX Carrier card solutions. The new feature is available as a no cost upgrade to current customers. Harry Wild, VP of Sales of Alta, highlights, “This unprecedented, new level of capability coupled with our 1553 AltaView and AltaRTVal test software provides a complete set of set tools for the avionics developer.”

BC Sig Gen Cap

Alta Data Technologies is a leading provider of avionics and I/O interface cards and software. Alta has introduced several new standard features such as signal capture, signal generators and advanced packetized 1553 Common Data Packet architectures. Provided with most cards is an advanced, modular AltaAPI software tool kit that easily ports between operating systems and provides true, independent application support between device channels. Alta’s PCI, PMC, PCCARD, VPX, cPCI and PCI Express interface cards and software are offered in multi channel configurations and includes ARINC combination channels on most platforms. Operating system platforms include MS Windows, Wind River VxWorks, Greenhills Software Integrity, IntervalZero RTX, LynxWorks LynxOS, Linux 32-bit and 64-bit, INtime RTX Shared Mode and Sun Solaris 64.

For more information, please contact Alta at 888-429-1553 x1 (in US) or 505-994-3111 x1 or at [email protected] and www.altadt.com.

Updated: 7 January 2010