Facing end-of-life challenges, old displays on ships in the U.S. Navy fleet are being replaced by new ones that are to be delivered by General Micro Systems, the company announced in February.
From an RFQ first seen in 2013, the SD19 SmartView display system is now in the deployment phase. General Micro Systems has been awarded multi-year contracts to deliver tens of displays per ship, with volume of several dozen ships per year.
“Combined, all programs will exceed several million dollars in revenue to GMS per year. And it started with a long-time customer,” said GMS CEO Ben Sharfi . “They knew we were in the smart display business, and they knew we supplied VME-based single-board computers to the Navy’s fleet of ships.”
Upon receipt of the system specification that required not only backwards compatibility with the existing display but also incorporated a ship data-management computer function, GMS quoted a smart display system that was a fraction of the cost, thinner and combined multiple functions into one.
The technical challenge was maintaining one hundred percent backwards compatibility with the existing display system while still adding the complete computer subsystem within the same physical space. “The other guys were over 8-inches thick, used a technology that isn’t rugged, and required a fan,” said Sharfi. “We are around 3.5-inches thin, passively cooled, and run circles around the competing solutions.”