In order to meet the goals of RASSP, Lockheed Sanders teamed with Motorola, Hughes Aerospace, and ISX. The technical work on the program is split nearly equally between Lockheed, Motorola and Hughes while ISX has a small, but significant role. Lockheed Sanders brings demonstrated expertise in rapid development and signal processing. Hughes brings extensive signal processing and military system development. Motorola brings recognized expertise in process improvement and in communications. ISX demonstrates skill in the management of large consortia.
Because of the success which Lockheed and the US Air Force have had on the F-22 program with the use of Integrated Product Teams, we chose to use a similar management technique on RASSP. Our program consists of four Integrated Process and Product Development Teams. These four teams include Systems, Design Environment, Demonstration, and Proliferation (Figure 1). All four companies have significant roles in all four teams.
Lockheed leads the Systems team as well as being the prime contractor on the program. The Systems team provides the methods and architecture that will support rapid development. These include the model year concept, the extensive use of virtual prototypes, the ability to "plug and play" hardware and software components, and extensive use of reuse libraries.
Motorola has the lead responsibility on the RASSP Design Environment (RDE). The RDE provides a flexible environment for the management of the development process, including work flow management, configuration management, metric collections, and communications. The RDE (as well as other services, including "pay-per-view" tool rental) will be provided commercially through the Electronic Information Corporation.
Hughes leads the Demonstration team. (Our demonstration is an IRST upgrade to the Navy's F-14). The demonstration team proves our methodology and environment while providing rapid feedback to the developers as to potential improvements.
ISX has the lead responsibility for the Proliferation team. The Proliferation team distributes the RASSP process and the RDE to beta sites to further demonstrate the process and to provide additional feedback to the developers.
The remainder of this article provides the reader with a better understanding of our RDE, our demonstration efforts, and our proliferation work. The RASSP Approach section gives a description of the organization of our system and how it will enhance the rapid development of signal processing systems. The Demonstration section gives a detailed description of the problem that we are undertaking and the methods that we are using. The Proliferation section describes our approach to beta sites and gives a glimpse at the future of the Electronic Information Corporation.
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