Victory has always belonged to he who could ‘apply technology’ on the battlefield. Here are some amazing technologies that make a superpower what it is. We will look at the IT in these cutting edge apps while taking you through a F22 Raptor cutaway, reflections on the Indian nuclear button, simulation techniques used by the Indian army, and futuristic technologies like the invisibility cloak. Plus, we’ll also unveil the relatively unknown side of some well-known IT companies who also make cutting edge defense apps.
The F22 Raptor. Sleek, stealthy and with a lean, mean first look of grey sternness, the F22 Raptor has the ultimate melding of the latest and the best in each technology that is packed away beneath its titanium-composite skin-from onboard computing systems reputed to be as powerful as seven supercomputers put together, to the radar-defeating stealth material and the design of its skin. It's a killer machine designed to pick off prey before it even gets to see the stealthy predator lurking beyond visual or conventional radar range. The Raptor is a fusion of cutting-edge technologies from different vendors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Pratt and Whitney, Raytheon and Texas Instruments.
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Almost every system onboard this 'first looks, first kill' stealth machine is in a class of its own. But notable even among these are its powerful radar and avionics system that runs on top of two Hughes-built CIPs (common integrated processors).
The F22's AN/APG-77 radar is made up of active-element, electronically scanning, non-moving arrays of
transmitter-cum-receiver modules (see cutaway on next page). Each of these finger-sized modules weighs about 15 grams and has a power output of 4W. The radar can change the direction, power and shape of its beam in a fraction of a second so as to minimize chances of detection. An F22 has one forward-looking array and two side arrays that give it unprecedented radar range.
The CIP is the brain of the F22's avionics, which work as an integrated unit. The CIP collates and processes all data and signals from the different sensors on the craft. For this, there are two CIPs with 66 modules each. Only about 75% of their capability is used as of now and 41 slots remain unused for future upgrades. There is also a provision to add a whole CIP of 66 modules in case of drastic upgrades. The processing capacity of this CIP is rated at more than 700 Mips (million instructions per second) that can be upgraded to 2,000 Mips. Similarly, its signal processing is rated at more than 20 Bops (billion operations per second) and can be expanded to up to 50 Bops.
The integrated nature of the avionics means that the pilot gets all relevant information from a single source through a number of MFDs or multi-function displays. The IT part of the MFD is explained by the nVidia's Quadro 2 Go GPU and Wind River's VxWorks OS.
The F22's avionics system is built around 1.7 million lines of code of which 90% is written in Ada. The software is made up of three complementing blocks. Block I contains more than 50% of the avionics full functionality source code, though its main function is radar capability. Very important and interesting is the redundancy built in. Should any part of the modules fail to function at any time of operation, another module automatically kicks in. If the CIP module that is acting as radio or the radar die/hang up as a result of any damage, one of the other modules will automatically reload the program and take over the radio or radar functionality. This approach to avionics makes the equipment extremely tolerant to combat damage as well as extremely flexible for future design upgrades.
Last but certainly not the least, the F 22 is a standing testimony to computing's growth. CATIA (developed by IBM and Dassault Systems) and COMOK software allowed design and manufacturing engineers to create, look at and visualize precise 3-D images of any part including complex routing for wires, tubes and cables. So the design team never had to build a 'hard' mock-up of the F 22!
Benoy George Thomas