Defense manufacturer Curtiss-Wright [CW] is launching a new initiative to support Army Materiel Command’s new C4ISR and electronic warfare modular system standards program, the company said at a conference Monday.
Curtiss-Wright’s defense solutions division will work with the Army’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) to define C4ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards (CMOSS) requirements needed for future acquisitions.
“In support of CMOSS, Curtiss-Wright is working with CERDEC to define and mature the CMOSS standards by developing reference implementations within the converged architecture,” the company wrote in a statement, following the announcement at the VITA Embedded Tech Trends 2018 Conference in Austin, Texas.
The CMOSS standards are intended to reduce the size, weight and power needs of C4ISR systems to build commonality across multiple platforms. Curtiss-Wright intends to assist CERDEC to ensure emerging acquisition programs are able to meet the new open architecture requirements.
Curtiss-Wright officials point to several of the company’s products that already meet CMOSS standards as positioning itself to best help CERDEC’s efforts. These include its commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS)-based rugged single board computers, Ethernet switches, radial clock modules, and data storage systems.
“CERDEC’s CMOSS suite of standards will help drive momentum in the embedded industry away from costly, complex proprietary solutions and towards COTS-based open architectures,” Lynn Bamford, senior vice president of the company’s defense solutions division, said in a statement. “We are very excited to announce Curtiss-Wright’s support for the U.S. Army’s CMOSS standards with a range of size, weight and power optimized open architecture subsystems. Using CMOSS, system integrators will employ true industry open standards to develop rugged COTS solutions to meet the Army’s critical requirements.”
Open architecture standards previously defined in the CMOSS initiative include network-based vehicular integration interoperability and meet hardware form factors developed by the OpenVPX industry working group.
Under CMOSS, future C4ISR and EW acquisition projects will also need to meet Modular Open RF Architecture resource requirements, to better share antennas or amplifiers, and set software framework to boost portability.
CERDEC has also explored working on CMOSS standards with the other services to improve open hardware capabilities, including the Air Force’s Sensor Open Systems Architecture and the Navy’s Hardware Open Systems Technologies.