FPGA-based military avionics computing circuits

There are processing requirements for military avionics applications in excess of 10/sup 10/ operations per second. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) support these types of processing rates, and also offer other advantages (i.e., lower cost, lower power consumption, and smaller size) for military avionics relative to alternate types of processing solutions. This paper discusses the need for very high performance computing in military avionics, with precision guided munition (PGM) applications used as an example of this need. It presents a model suggesting continued rapid improvements in FPGA processing capability, and it analyzes the utility of FPGAs as processing engines in terms of processing capability, cost, power consumption, and size. It presents several examples of the use of FPGAs as processing engines which validate the model, and it also uses these examples to describe various FPGA-based processing engine implementation techniques.