Utilizing low latency, high-performance solutions to increase Battlefield Mobility

By John Reardon, COTS Journal

Low latency, high-performance solutions are fielded by One Stop Systems (OSS) using the best commercial technologies available.

As the mobility of the military, in an ever-increasingly complex battlefield, emerges the need to bring advanced systems to the Edge is clear. The spectacle of advanced weapons stalling a superior fighting force, as evident in Ukraine, is driving the need to build a cohesive, autonomous, and semi-autonomous strategy for the United States. Moving commercial solutions and hardware to the edge has become imperative. This shift for tactical and combat vehicles is based on a compendium of communications and mixed signals to create an asymmetrical Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution that outstrips the enemy’s ability to react.

The Need

David Raun, CEO of OSS, has presented a vision that takes advances from the commercial sector and by addressing environmental concerns, moves them to the edge. These advances in making deterministic solutions for a mobile military are based on providing high-performance, transportable solutions. The challenge of placing the most advanced systems in a forward edge location draws on the company’s long history of rugged and semirugged solutions. Raun understood from the beginning that high performance was the key to addressing the demands of a highly connected battlefield. This has led the company to invest heavily in transporting huge datasets using PCIe.

PCIe Gen 5 versus Gen 4

The release of PCIe Gen 5.0, twice the speed of its predecessor at 32GT/Sec, was immediately recognized as a solution that would address the copious amounts of data dealt with on the front line. As corresponding storage and processing solutions begin to come to market such as Intel’s Alder Lake, or Samsung’s storage PM1743, the advantages of this 2x speed increase have had a huge impact on system design. The advantage of being downward compatible with Gen 4 would allow hybrid systems that could employ both Gen 4 and Gen 5, further assisting its deployment to the edge. PCIe offers high throughput as well as a small form factor, with scalable link widths of ×1, ×2, ×4, ×8, and ×16 lanes. PCIe is based upon a point-to-point bus topology between a root complex (system/host) and an endpoint (addin card) that supports full-duplex packet-based communications.

The Complexities of Implementing Gen 5

The speed which can be achieved by PCIe Gen 5 is not for the faint of heart as it demands advanced skills to harness in a rugged and reliable solution. With over a decade of being the first to market for production solutions that incorporate PCIe, OSS has released their Gen 5

PCIe Standards released over the years:

PCIe Generations Bandwidth PCIe 1.0

8GB/s

PCIe 2.0

16GB/s

PCIe 3.0

32GB/s

PCIe 4.0

64GB/s

PCIe 5.0

128GB/s

Giga transfer Frequency

2.5GT/s 2.5GHz

5GT/s 5GHz

8GT/s 8GHz

16GT/s 16GHz

32GT/s 32GHz

cable and host adapter that enables connections between servers and peripherals. The transfer rates peak at 128 GB/Sec for a full-duplex solution. Signal integrity running data at 32 GHz for up to two meters on a passive interconnect has set this solution apart from others. The OSS cable solution offers power control by supporting reset signals to downline expansion chassis.

The advances that the Army and others are placing on having an abundance of clean power within a vehicle in support of gun turrets, charging remote command centers, and drones, have led to placing power-hungry systems with advanced compute power within transportables throughout the battlefield. Examples such as the ISV (Infantry Squad Vehicle) and the JTLV (Joint Light Tactical Vehicle) have provided this opportunity, allowing sufficient power to be made available. The idea of greater available power amplifies the difficulties associated with limited space.

Image 2: Image 3:

Beyond the technology employed in the cable, the ability to control thermal implications created by size-sensitive packaging is required. OSS has embarked on meeting the applicational needs and maintaining the same thermal envelope as previously deployed Gen 4 solutions. This trick of doubling the throughput and potentially the storage and compute power, and at the same time conforming to the physical size constraints of the application, has enabled OSS to address the applications we face head-on.

By taking an advanced solution and extending it out to an expansion chassis, OSS has enabled a bifurcation of resources to maximize the SWaP potential of a transportable system. This makes solutions that extend Gen 5 to expansion chassis ideal for high bandwidth, low latency, HPEC applications such as video processing, C4ISR, AI, and RF.

In a recent application where there was a need to increase the sensitivity of a fire control RADAR system, it was decided that multiband, differential RADAR would be employed. The data rates created by the need for increased resolution challenged the prior generation of interconnects. But using an RF SOC from Xilinx combined with PCIe Gen 5 has made this type of solution a reality. The need to channel this data effectively and convey the relevant information to a fire

There is no immediate requirement to upgrade, as Gen 3 and 4 solutions will continue to make up the bulk of the market for years to come.

control system is just one example of how PCIe Gen 5 will impact future designs. This ability to support disaggregated solutions using advanced processing and storage opens several new avenues for performance-constrained systems.

Is PCIe Gen 5 right for you?

GNU Radio offers a broad array of tools for controlling and visualizing the signal performance of an RF system. With this software suite, you can visualize the signal in various ways to ensure that you are transmitting or receiving the correct signal. Moreover, GNU Radio allows you to perform a wide range of operations such as pulse shaping and developing modulation and demodulation schemes. By utilizing constellation diagrams, you can assess signals to ensure that modulation scheme errors are minimal and deterministic.

In applications where speed is not the primary concern, PCIe Gen 5 can benefit the system design by using fewer lanes and offering more bandwidth. Gen 5 in no way makes Gen 4 solutions obsolete, and as it is downward compatible with Gen 4, Gen 5 will afford you the horsepower to address dynamic applications.

There is no immediate requirement to upgrade, as Gen 3 and 4 solutions will continue to make up the bulk of the market for years to come. But it is safe to say that the most demanding solutions will be looking to the array of Gen 5 solutions that are coming to market. As Gen 5 is in its infancy, with the product supporting it just now coming to market; it will only be those that are pushing the performance curve that will do a hard shift. It is more our belief that Gen 5 will slowly migrate into systems to affirm that speed advantages are taken advantage of as solutions come to market.

The Future

As Gen 4 is still offered predominately, and Gen 5 is just now coming to market, the idea of discussing Gen 6 seems a bit silly but arriving just 3 years after the introduction of Gen 5, Gen 6 offers raw data rates of up to 64 GT/s and 256 GB/s x16 lanes. The new standard uses pulse amplitude modulation level 4 (PAM 4) signaling along with forward-looking error correction. As with previous Generations, Gen 6 will be backward capable with prior generations. It is not expected that Gen 6 will reach the broad market until sometime in 2026, with early adopters in Q4, 2025.

OSS continues to show its leadership and commitment to PCIe, and we would expect that they will keep to their history of being first in the market with advanced solutions.