US manufacturers are squaring up for a number of major contracts in the tactical military computer market that could determine which companies will achieve dominance over the next few years. Electronic News says that the US Air Force is about to select its ATF Advanced Tactical Fighter and the company that wins the contract will not only be in an ideal position for future sales, but to push for other advanced military aircraft orders. Also, the General Motors Corp company Hughes Aircraft Co, IBM, Texas Instruments and Westinghouse Electric Corp are competing for the Air Force’s F-16 Upgrade which will come several years before the ATF aircraft go into production. All four are offering 32-bit chip-set computers, and whichever wins will establish market leadership in the immediate future. The Army is due to award its laptop Lightweight Computer Unit contract which sources say may assume many of the uses planned for Army Tactical Command and Control System common hardware, and the contract will certainly affect the production and orders of add-ons for the common hardware, built by Miltope Inc and based on Hewlett-Packard’s HP 9000 series of Unix workstations. Electronic News describes the market for Navy shipboard computers as confused, largely because the open architecture Next Generation Computer Resources programme has been delayed, forcing the Navy to continue buying equipment that wac due to be phased out, benefiting both Unisys Corp and Control Data Corp. As regards the Joint Integrated Avionics Working Group standard 32-bit chip-set architectures, it is the ATF fighter contract that will largely decide whether the architecture will be based on Intel’s 80960 or MIPS Computer Systems Inc’s R4000 RISC, and which architecture third-party developers will support.
Central mission computer
Both contenders – Hughes with the 80960-based architecture and Northrop’s MIPS-based processor from Unisys and AT&T Co – use MIPS-based avionics computers. Another major contract, a new central mission computer for the F16, is also being contested by Hughes and Westinghouse, and IBM has entered the fray with its own proprietary chip-set. Neither the 80960 nor the MIPS-based version are fully developed, and both camps allege that the rival offering won’t be ready in time. There is also a deal of confusion in the the Navy’s avionics division, and an airborne distributive processing system based on Motorola’s 68030 in the Navy’s P-3C Avionics Update, is one year behind schedule. In addition, the Gulf crisis will have an effect, commentators say that the Army may decide to buy more laptops in place of the existing Miltope Army Tactical Command and Control System common hardware. There is a growing trend for commercial workstations to be bought in greater numbers, and many traditional suppliers of the military now see commercial vendors as their biggest competitors. This is leading to a number of joint development efforts like the Rugged Digital Systems Inc and Sun Microsystems bid for the Air Force’s Tactical Mission Planning Systems, worth some $50m and based on Sparcstation-2s.
