Trends in Aerospace Computers

Within the militarized computer disciplines, several significant trends have emerged within the recent past which have substantially affected both the development and application of computers to the aerospace environment. These include governmental standardization in most major areas of computer design including architecture , I/O, programming methodology, and packaging. Additionally, the application of computers into systems have come under the affects of governmental standardization through the use of data buses. Programming languages are beginning to experience significantly increased use despite some initial concerns about efficiency. From a technology perspective, the broad use of custom LSI has not yet impacted computer development; however, the use of devices such as microprocessors and Programmable Logic Arrays (PLAs) have received an increasing amount of use and will probably be the interim vehicle between current medium scale integration
(MSI) and the eventual use of custom LSI. In this paper the trends in these military computers will be examined by briefly considering the direction of each of the areas indicated above. Additionally, because of their association with the general purpose militarized computer, signal processors will also be briefly examined. Signal processors are a class of general purpose processor which have been tailored to a specific application in order to achieve substantially higher performance over a limited class of applications. As such, the signal processor is usually controlled by a general purpose (GP) processor or is organized as an "attached processor" and is architecturally viewed a s simply another CPU engine in a larger computing system.