Parvus Corp., a provider of rugged COTS computing and IP networking subsystems for Size, Weight and Power, or “SWaP,” constrained for military, aerospace and homeland defense applications, has reportedly announced that the company is soon going to introduce a new rugged 10-port PC104+ Gigabit Ethernet switch card. Named COM-1268, the new card has been specifically developed to deliver strong networking performance under extreme shock/vibe and thermal conditions usually prevailing within aerospace and defense applications. 

Previously, the company had launched 5-Port PRV-1059 10/100 switch board that proved to be very successful in the market, and to further enhance the results achieved, the COM-1268 offers twice the port density and ten times the bandwidth when compared to the PRV-1059 10/100 switch board. Further, it provides the users with the management capabilities for local/remote control and monitoring, and is available in a small form factor of PC/104-Plus measuring 3.550' x 3.775'.

The COM-1268 Layer 2 GigE switch can function properly within a temperature range of -40 to +85C and features ten 10/100/1000Mbps ports for networking with IPv4 and IPv6 compatible computing devices. The users can manage the card through an onboard microprocessor, which is compatible with IPv4/IPv6 Quality of Service traffic prioritization, Virtual Local-Area Network trunking, Simple Network Management and Rapid Spanning Tree redundancy. 

The switch board is available as a standalone board or integrated into a robust Commercial-Off-the-Shelf switch subsystem named DuraNET 1268, a mobile router subsystem named DuraMAR 3230, or a mission computer platform named DuraCOR 810-Duo. The board can run upon the power drawn through either the ISA/PCI (News - Alert) buses or 2-pin power connector for non-PC104 systems, and it doesn’t need any additional process for its operations. 

Developed with standard industrial components, the COM-1268 is equipped with thermal heatsink plates to simplify systems integration and conductive cooling. For extracting high-speed Gigabit Ethernet signals, a rugged, impedance-matched backplane-style connector does the needful in conjunction with an RS-232 serial console for CLI management, status LEDs, and declassification. 

The ports of the board can also be configured within a Web Graphic User Interface or ‘GUI’ through an out-of-band 10/100 Ethernet port, while a maximum of four of the board's switch ports can be utilized for making fiber optic connections. For meeting the need of any additional port density, the cascading multiple switch modules can be connected through any of the GigE ports. An onboard infrared interface helps in recognizing and managing the two stacked COM-1268 boards under the same console interface. 

Recently, Parvus Corporation had reportedly announced that its DuraCOR 810 mission computers had been integrated into Northrop Grumman's (News - Alert) MQ-5B Hunter Unmanned Aircraft System. According to the company, over 40 DuraCOR 810 subsystems had been delivered to sub-contractor Melhcorp and configured to operate as the Payload Interface Unit for the Hunter UAV.