CompactPCI still has value for aerospace and defense embedded computing designs

CompactPCI has been a staple of many military embedded systems for more than fifteen years. The venerable computer bus interconnect was ratified in 1995, and is still used today in applications where size and cost matter more than moving huge volumes of data.

The mature technology of CompactPCI has many advantages in aerospace and defense embedded computing. David Pepper, product manager and technologist for GE Intelligent Platforms in Charlottesville, Va., speaks of it fondly. “It’s a good synchronous bus and it’s fairly reliable,” Pepper says, “if you just need computing on frame, CompactPCI is good. You can get quite a bit of process and performance from CompactPCI.”