LONG BEACH, CA – January 16, 2006 – At the Bus & Board 2006 Conference today, two embedded computing leaders and an advanced cooling technology leader teamed up on a technology demonstration targeted at airborne defense and aerospace applications. The demonstration system shows the cooling capacity of a Hybricon liquid cooled ATR (Air Transport Rack) system configured with a VMETRO Phoenix VPF1 VXS board which is capable of dissipating over 90 watts of heat, and cooled by a Parker Hannifin HRU (Heat Rejection Unit) that is used to supply liquid for cooling.
The three companies worked together to create this demonstration, which combines the latest technologies from each of the companies. Hybricon developed the liquid cooled 1-ATR chassis, which is designed to power and cool high power conduction cooled boards that are typical in applications such as VITA 41/VXS and VITA 46. VMETRO’s Phoenix VPF1 is an industry leading VXS board that has been shipping to customers since early 2005. With dual PowerPC MPC7447 CPUs and dual Virtex-II Pro FPGAs, the VPF1 board is capable of generating a significant amount of heat. Depending on the customer algorithms in the FPGAs, the board can dissipate over 90 watts of heat. Parker Hannifin provided the Heat Rejection Unit (HRU), which is a deployable 1/2 –ATR format unit that supplies liquid and rejects the heat that is dissipated by the liquid-cooled ATR chassis.
Traditional conduction cooled ATR chassis can handle boards that dissipate 20-40 watts per slot. However, today’s airborne signal processing applications such as electronic warfare, ELINT, SIGINT, and electro-optical systems require higher levels of processing power which exceed the cooling capabilities of traditional conduction cooled ATR chassis. Liquid cooling provides a much better heat transfer mechanism to provide the cooling capacity required by the new generation of high performance VXS boards, such as the Phoenix VPF1.
The demonstration running in the Hybricon booth at the Bus&Board Conference includes a VMETRO Phoenix VPF1 board and a Hybricon VXS 7+1 backplane inside the 1-ATR chassis. Software running on the VPF1 dynamically changes the firmware load in two FPGAs on the Phoenix VPF1 to alter the heat dissipation of the board. Using the VPF1’s on-board temperature and power sensors, the software captures the temperature at the various power levels and transmits the data to a PC to be graphically displayed. The demonstration shows that the Hybricon liquid cooled ATR chassis is able to effectively cool a system designed around boards that can generate up to 100 watts of heat per slot.
According to Paul Freve, Hybricon’s President, “This demonstration showcases Hybricon’s advanced thermal engineering capabilities. Along with our partners’ products, we are demonstrating the practical application of High Power Conduction Cooled VXS boards in Hybricon’s new standard liquid cooled ATR chassis, designed to cool 100W per slot.” Hybricon’s liquid cooled ATR technology is now available to customers, and can be tailored to fit customers’ specific application requirements.
About Hybricon
Hybricon Corporation provides integrated system solutions to the telecommunications, military, industrial, medical imaging, and semiconductor equipment manufacturing industries. Hybricon ’s wide range of standard VME, VME64x, CompactPCI, and custom enclosure systems are engineered to meet the most stringent design requirements and provide innovative cooling solutions, EMI/RFI containment, and ruggedized construction. Engineering services including electrical and mechanical design, thermal /airflow modeling and analysis, and signal integrity analysis provide customers with reliable, high performance solutions, enabling faster time-to-market and lowering total cost of ownership. For more information, visit Hybricon’s website at www.hybricon.com.
About VMETRO
VMETRO provides integrators of high-end embedded computer systems with products and services, from development through deployment, with the highest levels of performance, innovation and reliability. The products are based mostly on open standards like VXS, PCI Express, VME, PCI and CompactPCI. Founded in 1986 in Oslo, Norway, and in the US since 1987, VMETRO is the world’s largest manufacturer of bus analyzers for standard buses such as VME, PCI and PCI Express. VMETRO also offers an extensive line of high-performance signal processing solutions, real-time data recorders, PMC I/O controllers and modules for real-time data processing, acquisition and networking. VMETRO has been traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange (Ticker: VME) since 1997. For more information, please visit www.vmetro.com.
About Parker Hannifin Corporation
Parker’s Advanced Cooling Systems business has developed a variety of fluid cooling solutions for military and commercial electronics applications that enable system integrators to achieve high compute and bandwidth density in the smallest volume possible. Parker is also involved with VITA Standards Organization (VSO) draft standard’s development working group for VITA 48 “Enhanced Ruggedized Design Implementation” (ERDI) and chairs VITA 50 “Liquid Cooling – Best Practices.”
With annual sales exceeding $8 billion, Parker Hannifin is the world’s leading diversified manufacturer of motion and control technologies and systems, providing precision-engineered solutions for a wide variety of commercial, mobile, industrial and aerospace markets. The company employs more than 50,000 people in 46 countries around the world. Parker has increased its annual dividends paid to shareholders for 49 consecutive years, among the top five longest-running dividend-increase records in the S&P 500 index. For more information, visit the company’s web site at www.parker.com, or its investor information site at www.phstock.com.