F22 Integrated Avionics AFFTC

Anyone who works in an office knows all about the never-ending influx of information.

E-mail, voice mail, and the near compulsive desire to print copies and distribute them to the world often leaves people swamped in data from which they must derive the necessary facts and make decisions.

The F-22 design team has worked hard to eliminate this side effect of the computer age and provide the F-22 pilot with information, while tasking the computer to organize the data and present it as coherent information to the human occupant.

To design an airplane that embodies these characteristics means moving beyond traditional design approaches.

Importance of avionics
Avionics share as large a part in the success of a fighter as the ability to maneuver and fly fast, or to "turn and burn."

The design issues that had to be addressed involved solving the technical and organizational challenges of running the program. Also crucial to the design, was the reduction of pilots' "housekeeping" responsibilities, allowing them to become tacticians with time to take advantage of the F-22's carefree abandon capabilities and increased lethability.

Different definitions
During the development stage of transforming this concept into a reality, the term "integrated avionics" meant different things to different people.

Because all the information is coordinated and available from a single source, to the pilot, "integrated avionics" means there is coherent presentation and control, as well as the organization of functions and the routing of lots of data to a single display. It also includes additional functionality, such as situation assessment and weapons fire control.

To the software engineer, "integrated avionics" means access to shared data about the situation, the mission and the aircraft systems. The software view of integration means that the various functional pieces of the software must have efficient access to globally-coherent information, such as track files, navigation data, mission data and aircraft system status information.

To the hardware designer, "integrated avionics" means common modules in a single backplane with the connectivity and bandwidth to support the required processing. A hardware architecture built on common components, common modules, standard buses and a common operating system provides the infrastructure for the processing and communication between these processes.

This modular approach allows for easy expansion of capacity and capability, fault tolerance and reconfiguration.

Computational power
The exponential explosion of computer technology in the last 10 years has allowed the F-22 team to radically alter every aspect of the program from detailed design through manufacturing, communication, and into the cockpit itself.

An example of the effect of the advances in computer technology is a comparison between the computers used in the Lunar Module and those used in the F-22.

The Lunar Module's computers operated at 100,000 operations per second and had 37 kilobytes of memory. Today, the F-22's main mission computers, which are called Common Integrated Processors, operate at 10.5 billion instructions per second and have 300 megabytes of memory.

These numbers represent 100,000 times the computing speed and 8,000 times the memory of the Apollo moon lander.

Information from the web sites of Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Pratt & Whitney were used in this story.