Deep water-ASIC design in the real world [submarine control systems]

The author describes how Dowty Maritime Systems developed a submarine command and control system for the UK Ministry of Defence. The system chosen was an ASIC-based distributed-multiprocessor architecture, and the author describes how early design decisions for the project included the choice of transputers for array processing, a Multibus II backplane for intercomputer communication, and a fibre-optic token ring for subsystem data communication. It was also recognised that implementing the proposed distributed architecture would require a set of suitable building blocks, in the form of purpose-designed single-board 32 bit computers with integral input/output