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Abaco Systems, Inc.

Abaco Systems, Inc. is a global provider of open architecture embedded computing and electronics systems for aerospace, defense and industrial applications, and has an active presence in hundreds of national asset platforms on land, sea and in the air.

The company headquarters and the newest Engineering Innovation Center is located across two campuses in Huntsville, Alabama. Other primary manufacturing locations include Towcester, England and Austin, Texas. The company has four Centers of Excellence in Goleta, CA with avionics; in Edinburgh, Scotland with networking; in Billerica, MA with high performance embedded computing; and in Austin, Tx with RFSoC/DSP. Abaco employs over 750 people and has sales offices in Europe and Australasia, and an extensive network of resellers.

History

Abaco Systems was formed in December of 2015 as the result of GE Intelligent Platforms selling its embedded computing business unit to Veritas Capital, a private equity firm investing in companies that provide critical products to government and commercial customers.

GE's embedded computing business was built through the acquisitions of VMIC, Inc. in 2001, followed by RAMIX in 2003 , Condor Engineering , SBS Technologies Inc. and Radstone Technology (which had itself acquired ICS of Canada and Octec of the UK) in 2006. As such, the company's products and people have roots going back 30+ years to Berg, GreenSpring Computers, Logical Design Group, Bit 3 Computer, Micro Alliance, V-I Computer, SciTech, SDL Communications, Essential Communications and Avvida.

In November 2016, Abaco acquired 4DSP LLC of Austin, Texas. Founded in 2004, 4DSP developed commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) high speed digital signal processing and data acquisition solutions based on FPGA and RFSoC technology.

Also in November 2016, Abaco acquired the MMS product line from Technobox Inc. MMS products provide the unique ability for customers to configure I/O at lower cost with reduced lead-time.

In October 2017, Rich Sorelle was appointed CEO. A defense electronics veteran, his 30+ year career had seen him with Grumman Corporation and then with ITT/Exelis where he most recently served as President of the Electronic Systems division. Sorelle took over from Bernie Anger, who had overseen the transition from GE.

In February 2020, Abaco completed its move to a new headquarters facility in Huntsville, hosting a significant new Engineering Innovation Center, together with a purpose-built training facility while freeing up additional space for manufacturing at the south campus.

Technology

Abaco Systems creates embedded computing products designed to be deployed in harsh, challenging environments such as on the battlefield (on land, on sea and in the air) and industrial environments such as transportation and manufacturing, complying with standards such as MIL-STD-810. According to IHS, the company is the largest supplier of embedded computing boards based on VITA (the VMEbus International Trade association) standards. The company also specializes in the technologies necessary to develop and deliver products that feature minimal SWaP – size, weight and power consumption – enabling those products to be deployed in highly constrained environments.

All Abaco products are designed around industry standard technologies such as processors from Intel, Qualcomm Power Architecture  (NXP, Freescale) and ARM; graphics processors from NVIDIA and AMD/Radeon; interconnects such as Gigabit Ethernet and PCI Express; and serial switched fabrics such as InfiniBand and Serial RapidIO.

As well as supporting industry standard technologies, Abaco’s products also provide extensive support for industry standards like SOSA and CMOSS. The SOSA Consortium enables government and industry to collaboratively develop open standards and best practices to enable, enhance and accelerate the deployment of affordable, capable, interoperable sensor systems.

CMOSS (C4ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards) is an initiative of the US Army designed to bring about reduced C4ISR SWaP in embedded military systems while ensuring commonality across multiple platforms through sharing of hardware and software components.

Many of the company’s products are designed to enable customers to achieve safety certification to standards including DO-178B and DO-254.

Abaco Systems is NVIDIA’s preferred provider of GPGPU-based products into the rugged systems market.

Hardware Products

Abaco Systems products are built using modular, open architectures, industry standard principles and technologies and are based on, for example, OpenVPX and VME from the VITA standards organization, and CompactPCI from the PICMG standards organization. All products use commercially-available components and are designed in a range of ruggedization levels.

Subsystems and Systems

The company provides a range of pre-integrated, pre-configured, pre-validated application-ready subsystems, systems, rugged display computers and advanced vehicle computers that are designed to enable customers to make a fast, cost-effective start to a program. These are available in a number of form factors and architectures.

Embedded Boards

Abaco has over 1,000 products covering the major building blocks of embedded systems: single board computers, multiprocessors, networking and I/O, sensor-, signal- and image processing, graphics and video, and avionics databuses and analyzers

Software Products

Abaco Systems provides a software environment to support the company’s hardware. AXIS (Advanced Multiprocessor Integrated Software) is a suite of integrated software development tools. It is designed to simplify the process of creating sophisticated signal processing applications based on multiprocessor platforms.

Health Toolkit is a software toolkit designed to maximize system reliability and success in mission critical environments. It operates between the underlying hardware and the application software, interrogating all aspects of the hardware’s performance, and optionally reports on its health via an intuitive GUI and enables corrective measures to be taken if necessary.

Software support also includes Deployed Test Software (BIT and BCS). Abaco’s products are variously compatible with Microsoft Windows, Linux, VxWorks from Wind River Systems, LynxOS from Lynx Software Technologies, and INTEGRITY from Green Hills Software.

Services

A range of support services is offered by Abaco, including the PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) program which was launched 30+ years ago, and which has seen many programs supported over decades. PLM reduces customers’ long term cost of ownership by minimizing the impact of component and product obsolescence.

Market, Customers and Applications

Abaco's products are designed primarily for deployment in environments that are subject to extremes of shock, vibration, temperature and moisture/contaminant ingress. These include all types of military vehicles and military/commercial aircraft, as well as equipment deployed in industrial environments such as energy exploration, and transportation. Abaco’s products are also deployed in space applications such as the International Space Station.

Typical applications include electronic warfare, mission computing, ISR (intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance), radar, sonar, signals intelligence, target acquisition and sensor/image/video capture and processing.

Abaco’s customers include major defense organizations - prime contractors, systems integrators and OEMs. Substantial orders have been won from companies like: General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems. End users include the armies, navies and air forces of the world, notably the US Army, US Navy and US Air Force.