Developing a stable architecture for interfacing aircraft to commercial personal computers

The focus of this paper is the concept of utilizing commercial PC products and interfacing them to military and commercial aircraft. The problem of the life cycle 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 are 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 is 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.