Jim Shaw, EVP of Engineering at Crystal Group, explains the origin of ruggedized COTS, and how Crystal Group provides ruggedized COTS equipment to their customer base.
What is Ruggedized COTS?
Hi my name is Jim Shaw; I’m the Executive Vice President of Engineering at Crystal Group in Hiawatha, Iowa. We are here today in our factory at Crystal Group, and I’m here to talk to you just a little bit about ruggedized COTS.
As most of you know, ruggedized COTS came about in 1994, when the Perry Memo came out, and that is when the military finally decided that they were not leading the charge in terms of innovation and technology. It was being driven more by the PC and cell phone industry, so we’ve had to adapt COTS technology to military applications, and that is sort of our job here at Crystal Group. That is to take that COTS architecture that going to be around for a long time, and can be militarized. We’re going to ruggedize it to the point that it will withstand the 810, 461, the MIL standard environments, that we’re looking to put these pieces of equipment in. Not that these pieces of equipment were intended for those environments, but that’s what we’re doing is that we’re actually ruggedizing them so that they can go into those environments.
The SE16 Sealed Server is an example of one of the products that we have. This is completely sealable, and it has mil-circular connector output. It’s an IP67, i7 processor, inside a sealed box.