Reconfigurable launch acceptability region calculator for airborne systems

In the world of airborne systems, there are a variety of determinations and calculations that must be performed not only accurately, but within critical time limits. For military aircraft, these components are inherently embedded into the avionics flight software (AFS) as well as the stores management system (SMS). Among the various weapon ranging calculations that reside within the SMS, one of the most important metrics is the launch acceptability region (LAR). The purpose of this paper is to present a robust, yet flexible implementation for a LAR calculator. Using an FPGA platform, the intent is to demonstrate the feasibility of a highspeed, low-power, low-cost, re-programmable solution. It is anticipated that this implementation will offer several times speed up over the conventional microprocessor-based or DSP-based implementation.