Advanced High Speed Bus Technologies for Units Under Test (UUT), Test and Evaluation

The Navy relies on automatic test systems (ATS) such as the Consolidated Automatic Support System (CASS) to save billions of dollars in maintenance costs over fragmented testing techniques, minimize aircraft downtime, and quickly re-certify avionics components. Although they are state-of-the-art, modern automatic test systems like CASS interface only with conventional data buses and are unable to support current, high-speed digital data buses. Because the latest aircraft avionics and weapons systems are now incorporating high-speed buses such as SATA, Wi-Fi, IEEE 1394 FireWire, and USB, there is an immediate need to integrate high-speed bus testing into ATS. Technology Service Corporation (TSC) proposes to develop an ATS High-Speed Bus Tester (HSBT) by leveraging the test creation flexibility of its Crane Custom Test Bench (CCTB) while remaining platform agnostic through the use of IEEE 1671 ATML abstraction. CCTB is an automatic test system currently providing radar, electronic warfare, and communications testing for the Navys ALQ-218 Tactical Jamming Receiver at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane Division. Its architecture is built upon LabVIEW Object-Oriented Programming (LVOOP) and utilizes packed libraries and XML configuration files to provide flexible building blocks for test.