Technical Advantage: Driving Lead Times to a Minimum

Quick delivery time is not just about procurement planning. There’s a technical advantage in design & production phase enable us to offer minimum lead time in OBC manufacturing. CAVU has standard products like OBC-Cube-Polar, Thermal Control Unit, OBC-Hyper-Polar which take advantage of modular design to have standard main board with bespoke peripheral boards. GPUs building local network of CAVU Aerospace, outperforms a building full of designers & this is main advantage to drive delivery lead times (even for bespoke boards) to absolute minimum possible. In this article, we’re show casing one of the most time-consuming tasks in design phase to show AI capability in our own local AI can effectively help to reach minimum delivery times.

Designing an advanced OnBoard Computer for spacecraft is not simply a matter of placing components on a PCB and connecting them together. As processing performance, interfaces and system complexity increase, PCB design has become one of the most time-consuming stages of OBC development.

At CAVU Aerospace, our OBC designs for most of products can incorporate 22+ PCB layers and thousands of pin-to-pin connections within a compact area like 96 × 96 mm board. Routing these connections while satisfying signal-integrity, power-distribution, thermal, mechanical and manufacturing requirements presents a significant engineering challenge. To address this challenge, CAVU Aerospace is utilizing and continuously training its own GPUs for local AI network to assist automated PCB routing. It’s been designed specifically around the requirements of high-density space electronics & GPUs are trained better every single day how to do the job better, faster & more reliable.

The difference made by using AI-assisted PCB routing is so huge, compared to difference between using CAD or paper design.

Modern spacecraft computers must provide increasingly high levels of processing capability and connectivity while remaining extremely compact, reliable and power efficient.

An OBC may simultaneously contain High-performance FPGA or SoC devices, High-speed memory interfaces, Multiple communication interfaces, Power-management circuitry, High-speed differential signals, Clock and timing networks, Spacecraft I/O interfaces with several peripheral components & Redundant or safety-critical functions. All of these functions need to be interconnected within a limited PCB area.

For a board measuring only 96 × 96 mm, having thousands of pin to pin connections across more than 22 layers creates a highly constrained routing problem. Traditionally, much of this work relies on experienced PCB designers manually determining routing paths, layer assignments, vias and signal transitions. As board complexity increases, the number of possible routing combinations grows dramatically, making the process increasingly time-consuming. This can ultimately affect one of the most important factors in the space industry: delivery time.