Sparrow™ AMC ATDS Serial

The AMC Airborne Tactical Data System (ATDS) Serial board installs in an industry standard Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) site to provide a Tactical Digital Information Link (TADIL) A serial channel compliant with MIL-STD-188-203- 1A, Appendix D2. In addition to conventional input and output operations, the ATDS serial board has a built-in passive tap mode that provides interface monitoring and data capturing capability. A software-enabled, embedded time-stamp generator tags input words with 125 ns resolution. The time-stamp clock can be synchronized between multiple boards by using a small interconnect cable and can be driven by an external clock source.

Easy to program

The ATDS serial board is easy to program and offers a variety of input and output modes to support all ATDS protocols. All the ATDS control frames and timing required to transfer individual ATDS words are generated by the hardware control logic. The software is only required to initially set the appropriate bits in the control registers to select the desired transfer method (DMA, non-DMA, Interrupt on completion, Interrupt on each word, etc.), the ATDS word type (Address/Sidetone or Data), and then enable the transfer. The interface comes standard with a driver for a number of commonly used operating systems, an excellent documentation package, and sample C language code that can be freely used in application software.

Easy to maintain

For maintenance and reliability, the ATDS Serial board has an internal loopback path that allows it to be tested without disconnecting cables. The Sparrow can be updated in the field by reconfiguring its Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) logic to add functionality or compensate for non-compliant interfaces. FPGA technology reduces component obsolescence, enabling the Sparrow to be deployed and supported for years to come.