A178 Thunder embedded mission computer

The A178 Thunder embedded mission computer is a sealed, ultra-small-form-factor GPGPU computer from Aitech, built around the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier system-on-module. It serves as an onboard mission computer for platforms that need artificial-intelligence inference, video processing and signal processing inside a compact, fanless enclosure.

Aitech positions the unit for military and defense payloads with heavy computing demands: distributed computing and signal processing on autonomous vehicles, and surveillance, targeting and electronic-warfare systems. For an unmanned aircraft integrator, that places it in the payload bay as the processor that runs perception, target detection or sensor fusion close to the sensors, rather than streaming raw data to the ground.

The processing figures come from the Xavier module. The CPU has 8 cores based on ARM v8.2 64-bit, and the Volta-architecture GPU has 512 CUDA cores and 64 Tensor cores. The module reaches 32 TOPS in INT8 and 11 TFLOPS in FP16, and the unit carries 32 GB of LPDDR4x memory. The INT8 figure is the one that matters for neural-network inference, while the FP16 figure applies to heavier floating-point workloads. Efficiency is stated as 1,067 GFLOPS/W in INT8 and 366 GFLOPS/W in FP16, which helps when the power budget of the airframe is tight. A hardware H.264/H.265 encoder compresses video for downlink or recording. Software access is through CUDA, OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan.

Mass and size are given as less than 5.5 lb and 8.5 in x 3.2 in x 6.8 in. Storage consists of an NVMe SSD plus a removable micro SD card, so mission data and the operating image can be handled separately.

Interfaces are broad for a computer of this size. Video capture covers SDI (SD and HD) with 4 channels at once and composite video (RS-170A NTSC or PAL) with 8 channels at once, which suits payloads that combine several cameras. The I/O set includes Gigabit Ethernet, 10G Ethernet, DVI/HDMI output, DisplayPort output, USB 3.0 and 2.0, UART serial, discretes and CAN bus. The unit is offered in I/O variants 00 to 03. Starter kits supply an external power supply, a J1 power cable and J2 I/O cable (variant 03 adds a J3 cable), and matching mating connector sets are listed as accessories.

The enclosure is environmentally sealed to IP65 and the maker describes low power consumption. No other certifications or standards are stated on the product page.

Typical applications are multi-camera surveillance and targeting payloads, onboard AI inference for autonomous vehicles, real-time video encoding and signal-processing tasks in electronic-warfare equipment.