Sonar display consoles: Present and future architectures

Existing Sonar Display and Control (SDC) Consoles for an integrated acoustic SONAR system provide the following capability: two display CRT´s; 10-bit x/y resolution; 3-bit tonal dynamic range, full alphanumeric, symbology, graphics and raster generation; large internal memory for refresh, data and program store; console supervision through centralized computer complex; predominantly SSI logic and highly programmable interactive controls. The acquisition cost is relatively high and on-board maintenance is a definite requirement. Future 1980 SONAR systems should evolve toward a distributed network of intelligent SDC´s in an architecture that provides both high system availability and facility resource-sharing by all SDC´s. As we see it, the future SDC format/control requirements will likely be comparable to those available today but with more internal standalone functional and supervisory capability. The technology will make maximum use of MSI/LSI with a high degree of commonality between processor and display modules. The key design concerns are casualty-mode architecture, cost and reliability with minimum-to-zero on-board maintenance. The following is our assessment of some of the likely details of this future architecture.