Leesburg VA, October 4, 2005 – Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing has announced Advantage-Zeta, a new radar scan converter that combines radar signal acquisition and scan conversion on a single PCI card. The new PCI card uniquely offers radar display designers the highest performance while maintaining a minimal slot count.
“Advantage-Zeta combines Curtiss-Wright’s scan conversion and radar acquisition technology onto a single board solution that frees the PCI bus and host computer while simplifying system architectures,” said Darwin Beckel, president, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, Subsystems Solutions. “This new PCI card complements our existing radar acquisition, distribution and display capability and provides our customers with more choices for radar display solutions.”
The card supports up to three analog videos inputs, with one video input selected for acquisition. Advantage-Zeta also supports up to 8 digital radar inputs, which may be mixed with the selected analog video. A wide range of radar input options are also supported, including ACP/ARP, RADDS, serial, and parallel azimuth options.
Advantage-Zeta supports the use of industry-standard DVI graphics cards in radar display architectures, an approach Curtiss-Wright pioneered over five years ago. This approach enables system integrators to incorporate the latest PCI or PCI Express designs into their system architecture, and results in the best graphics performance at the lowest price.
Advantage-Zeta digitizes and processes radar video and turning data for presentation to the radar scan converter. The scan converter creates one or more PPI views of the radar video, providing a high-resolution display up to 1600 x 1200 pixels. The scan converter next combines the resulting radar picture with a graphics signal from any industry-standard DVI-compatible graphics card. The DVI output from the graphics card becomes an input to Advantage-Zeta, which intelligently mixes the radar video picture with the incoming graphics picture to create a composite, multi-layer display of overlay and underlay graphics, which when blended with the radar video, can drive a DVI or analog RGB monitor.
The card supports range correlation enabling it to sample radar video at up to 50 MHz and reduce down to a programmed return length of 2048 or 4096. Radar PRFs of up to 8 KHz are supported with optional azimuth correlation used to reduce the output data to either 2048 or 4096 azimuths per scan in scanning mode.
Advantage-Zeta is designed for use in any standard PCI chassis with motherboard or passive backplane architecture. Since video acquisition and processing are handled entirely on the card, PCI traffic is greatly reduced and consists only of low data rate messages to move radar windows, change view geometry or adjust an operating parameter.
Software support for Advantage-Zeta includes drivers for Windows, Solaris and Linux operating environments.
The Advantage-Zeta PCI card complements Curtiss-Wright’s wide range of signal acquisition and scan conversion products. For more information about Curtiss-Wright radar processing solutions please visit www.cwcembedded.com.
Pricing for the Advantage-Zeta PCI card starts at $8,500 USD in single unit quantity. Shipping is expected to begin in October, 2005. For information regarding Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing products or services, contact John Wranovics, director of public relations, Tel: (925) 640-6402; Fax: (510) 530-8563; email. [email protected]. Web site: www.cwcembedded.com.
Inquiries: Please forward all Sales and reader service inquiries to Jerri-Lynne Charbonneau, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, Tel: (613) 254-5112; Fax: (613) 599-7777; e-mail: [email protected].
About Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing
Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing is the industry’s most comprehensive and experienced single source for embedded solutions, ranging from Processing, Subsystems, Data Communication, DSP, and Video & Graphics to the most advanced board level components and fully integrated custom systems. The Embedded Computing group serves the defense, aerospace, commercial and industrial markets and is part of Curtiss-Wright Controls Inc. For more information about Curtiss-Wright visit www.cwcembedded.com.
About Curtiss-Wright Controls, Inc.
Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Curtiss-Wright Controls is the motion control segment of Curtiss-Wright Corporation (NYSE: CW). With manufacturing facilities around the world, Curtiss-Wright Controls is a leading technology-based organization providing niche motion control products, subsystems and services internationally for the aerospace and defense markets. For more information, visit www.cwcontrols.com.
Forward-looking statements in this release are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: a reduction in anticipated orders; an economic downturn; changes in the competitive marketplace and/or customer requirements; an inability to perform customer contracts at anticipated cost levels; a change in government spending; and other factors that generally affect the business of aerospace, defense contracting, marine electronics and industrial companies. Please refer to the current SEC filings for Curtiss-Wright Corporation under the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, for further information.