A Flexible Architecture For Interactive Tactical Display Terminals

A display terminal architecture has been developed by the Boeing Aerospace Company that affords significant design flexibility to meet the requirements of a number of diverse interactive applications. The architecture is dominated by an image refresh memory and a local database memory. These memories are interconnected by a variable number of highspeed general purpose microprocessors and hardware processors that translate local database and highspeed interface information into appropriate image list formats. Images are formed using a high performance directed beam graphics generator and indicator. The console may be connected to its host computer using either standard serial interfaces or DMA. Serial interfaces link directly to one of the microprocessors while DMA is provided to the database and the refresh memories. By using a combination of stored program algorithms, special microcoded instruction sequences, special hardware processors and tailored graphics command formats; realtime, application dependent, processes are implemented within the context of a performance hierarchy. This paper describes hardware and software issues as related to the console architecture and describes two contrasting display systems: an airborne electronic counter counter-measure (ECCM) display and a mobile ground based air surveillance display. In particular, hardware and software techniques that implement concurrent and pipelined processes, display database sharing, and critical regions for these applications are described.