Wikipedia Draft:Abaco Systems

Abaco Systems, Inc. is a global company that produces open architecture rugged, embedded computing and electronics systems for aerospace, defense and industrial applications.

The company headquarters and Engineering Innovation Center are located across two campuses in Huntsville, Alabama. The company's two other primary manufacturing locations are in Towcester, England and Austin, Texas. Other Engineering sites include Goleta, CA focused on avionics; Edinburgh, Scotland dedicated to networking; Billerica, MA designing high performance embedded computing (HPEC); and in Austin, Tx engineering RFSoC/DSP. Abaco employs over 750 people and has additional offices in Europe and Australasia, and a global network of resellers.

History
Abaco Systems was formed in December 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 Compu

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, a defense electronics veteran, previously with Grumman Corporation and then with ITT/Exelis took over from Bernie Anger, who had overseen the transition from GE.

In February 2020, while maintaining the existing manufacturing location at the south campus, Abaco moved its headquarters to just outside of Redstone Gateway.

On March 22, 2021, AMETEK announced an agreement to acquire Abaco Systems.

Technology
According to the Embedded Computer Boards Modules Systems Report of 2016, Abaco is the largest supplier of embedded computing boards based on VITA (the VMEbus International Trade association) standards complying with standards such as MIL-STD-810. Abaco has technology partnerships in place for processors with Intel, Qualcomm Power Architecture  (NXP, Freescale) and ARM; graphics processors from NVIDIA and AMD/Radeon; interconnects from Gigabit Ethernet and PCI Express; and serial switched fabrics such as InfiniBand and Serial RapidIO. Additionally, Abaco Systems is NVIDIA’s preferred provider of GPGPU-based products into the rugged systems market.

Their technologies are designed to align and provide extensive support for industry standards like SOSA, CMOSS, OpenVPX and VME from the VITA standards organization and CompactPCI from the PICMG standards organization.


 * 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. Abaco is an active member supporting this initiative.
 * 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.
 * Their technologies also support achieving safety certification to standards including DO-178B and DO-254.

Hardware Products

Abaco Systems products utilize modular, open architectures, industry standard principles and technologies. The hardware includes pre-integrated, pre-configured, pre-validated application-ready subsystems, systems, rugged display computers and advanced vehicle computers, which are commercially-available (COTS) components designed in a range of ruggedization levels. These technologies cover the major building blocks of a typical embedded system: single board computers, multiprocessors, networking and I/O, sensor-, signal- and image processing, graphics and video, and avionics databuses and analyzers.

Software Products

The company's software supports its hardware offerings. For example, AXIS (Advanced Multiprocessor Integrated Software) is a suite of integrated software development tools designed to simplify the process of creating sophisticated signal processing applications based on multiprocessor platforms, while the Health Toolkit operates between the underlying hardware and the application software, monitoring hardware’s performance and reporting on its health via an intuitive GUI which enables corrective measures to be taken if necessary.

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

Services

Abaco's two main services are contract electronics manufacturing (CEM) and PLM (Product Lifecycle Management).


 * CEM services specialize in NPI, prototyping and pre-production and production of batch-build, high reliability, high quality, high performance surface mount technology (SMT) and mixed/through-hole and plated through-hole (PTH) printed circuit board assemblies (PCBA).
 * Their PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) program which was launched as a service 30+ years ago, has supported many programs over decades and reduces customers’ long term cost of ownership by minimizing the impact of component and product obsolescence.

Market, Customers and Applications
Abaco's products are deployed 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 and even 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 industrial, commercial, and 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.