Open Standard COTS AFT Chassis Provides Optimal Cooling

The Hybricon AFT16 from Curtiss-Wright’s Defense Solutions division, touted as the industry’s first COTS OpenVPX Air Flow Through (AFT) Chassis, is designed to provide optimal cooling for the most advanced, high performance modules, such as Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA, multicore Intel Core i7, and GPGPU-based VPX SBCs and DSP engines. Leveraging Curtiss-Wright’s proven AFT subsystem technology, the AFT16 is the first rugged COTS chassis to support the ANSI/VITA 48.5 AFT standard featuring Northrop Grumman’s patented AFT cooling technology. Enabling reliable cooling of 120 W to 200 W cards within the boundaries of +55°C air, the new 16-slot AFT chassis, designed for use with highly rugged, sealed 6U VPX modules, is suited for dense, high performance systems such as those deployed in C4ISR applications, including SIGINT, ELINT, COMINT and radar processing. The Hybricon AFT16 chassis supports 16 ANSI/VITA 48.5 6U air flow through slots with 13 slots of 1.5" pitch for AFT OpenVPX cards and 3 slots for power supplies for up to 2,370 W of power, delivering a highly efficient open standards-based cooling method that ensures optimal performance from the most densely integrated host boards and mezzanine modules.

CURTISS-WRIGHT CORPORATION