Forum: F-35 Avionics

Some time long after the F-35 becomes IOC, will the F-22 be able to upgraded to have equivalent sensors + avionics to the F-35?

Some time long after the F-35 becomes IOC, will the F-22 be able to upgraded to have equivalent sensors + avionics to the F-35?

This was the plan back about 2008ish. It was cancelled because of excessive cost. This is the key problem with the fighter: the avionics suite has been found to be extremely difficult to upgrade. Various attempts to do so have been marred by excessive costs. We shall see what the AF does in the future.

This was the plan back about 2008ish. It was cancelled because of excessive cost. This is the key problem with the fighter: the avionics suite has been found to be extremely difficult to upgrade. Various attempts to do so have been marred by excessive costs. We shall see what the AF does in the future.

Ada's Ancestry
Back in 1957, a computer scientist at IBM Corporation named John Backus created a new language that was intended to make it so that scientists, engineers and mathematicians could more easily solve mathematical and scientific problems. The language, FORTRAN, which is short for "FORmula TRANslation," was a complete success; forty years later, it's still being actively used and developed.

Across the Atlantic, in Europe, some computer scientists who had known about FORTRAN formed a committee to create their own language, one that they could use for the same purposes as FORTRAN. Only months later, in 1958, the new programming language, dubbed "ALGOL," an acronym for "ALGOrithmic Language," was all finished, and quickly standardized.

It's often considered "tradition" to name a computer language standard after the year that it was standardized, so the creators of ALGOL named it ALGOL 58. People all over Europe continued to work on ALGOL, and only two years later, ALGOL 60 was unleashed.

ALGOL 60 is very important in the history of several languages used today, including Ada. From ALGOL 60 we get three language families:

SIMULA, created by a group of computer scientists at the University of Oslo in Norway.

CPL, created by Ken Thompson of AT&T Bell Laboratories for the purpose of writing the MULTICS operating system, which was a precursor to Unix. CPL is the ancestor of C.

Last but not least, there was Pascal, written by Niklaus Wirth of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland for the purpose of teaching programming to college students, and it is from Pascal that we get Ada.


The Contest
In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States Department of Defense was using more than 2,000 languages for its mission-critical programming. Most of these were languages that were developed for one specific job. Finally, in 1975, the DoD formed the U.S. Department of Defense High-Order Language Working Group (HOLWG) to find a solution to what was often called the "software crisis."

What the HOLWG group members decided was that they needed to create a language that they could use for just about anything, whether it be systems programming, artificial intelligence, and, most important of all, real-time programming and embedded systems. Real-time programs are the programs used for controlling such things as traffic lights, guided missiles, and bar-code scanners. Embedded systems are the small computers that are built into most modern cars, airplanes, and stereos.

Rather than create this new language themselves, they decided to hold a contest. Several teams joined, each represented by a color. Coincidentally, all of the teams created Pascal-based languages. In the end, the winner was the green team -- CII Honeywell-Bull in France. Eventually, the language was christened "Ada," in honor of Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter of famed poet Lord Byron and assistant to mathematician Charles Babbage, who invented the Analytical Machine. Lady Ada is often considered to be the world's first programmer.

In 1979, the DoD created its first draft documentation on Ada, and the language was first standardized in 1983. Now named "Ada 83", this standard was originally controlled entirely by the DoD, and nobody outside the DoD could create any Ada compiler without the authorization of the Defense Department.

All that changed in 1987, however, when the DoD released Ada to the public and the language was made an international standard by the International Standards Organization (ISO). By 1990, over 200 validated Ada compilers had been produced, and in 1995 a new standard, called Ada 95, was announced. Ada 95 is object-oriented, and offers interfaces to the languages C, FORTRAN and COBOL.


ADA in the F-22
Ninety percent of the software for the F-22 is written in Ada. Exceptions to the Ada requirement are granted only for special processing or maintenance requirements.

For some of the higher risk software, such as sensor data fusion, specific algorithm testbeds have been constructed. Prototype software, which is instrumented to measure performance (correlation times, accuracy, etc.) has been operational since the start of Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase of the F-22 program.

Increment 3.1 hardware modifications enable the F-22 to host Increment 3.1 capabilities including retargeting Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), carriage and delivery of the Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) on preplanned missions using the Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS), using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Air-to-Ground radar mode to permit attack of emerging targets, and saving SAR imagery onto the Tactical Data Transfer System (TDTS) for post-mission analysis.

Increment 3.1 modernizes F-22 aircraft with Enhanced Central Integrated Processor (ECIP) cards, a new Map Inter-Face (MIF) board for the 4th generation APG-77VI radar, a modification to the GPS Inertial Navigation System (GINS), and a TDTS.

Installation of these kits is done either at the depot or by a contractor field team depending on the complexity of the effort.

Increment 3.1 also includes Mission Support Requirements.

The biggest advantage for software today is the speed and capability of the hardware available. Memory size and speed, processor speed, and access times are what made today's avionics what they are.
fisk

The mandate by DOD to use ADA was a disaster. The language was designed by committee, the certified compilers were being developed as the language changed, NO real time code was ever determined to actually operate in real time, and the number of qualified ADA coders was only ever just a handful.
The biggest advantage for software today is the speed and capability of the hardware available. Memory size and speed, processor speed, and access times are what made today's avionics what they are.
fisk

I can see the future of all aircraft Avionics software being written in the F-35 overall style

C/C++ as the base language for all software aspects.

Everything running on isolated VM's.

Middleware to isolate hardware from software so easy switching of hardware won't cause headaches in software.

It's a superior architecture IMO, using the latest COTS Hardware/Software practices.

Moving forward, I can see all aircraft across the entire aerospace industry going that way with standardized avionics software design.