Texas Engineering Experiment Station

From the outside, airliners are sleek and simple. Deep inside, where we never look, they're anything but simple. Open up that airliner and you'll see a complex network of computer microprocessors and control systems.

These computer-controlled systems do everything from showing the pilot how fast the plane is flying to telling flaps and ailerons when and how much to move. We don't care, as long as the airplane gets us where we're going safely and we can afford the ticket.

The problem for airplane manufacturers and their suppliers -- many in Texas -- and eventually, for passengers like us is that the microprocessors that fly the airplane do different things than the chips in your cell phone or desktop computer. Because airplane manufacturers build so few airplanes (compared to computers or cell phones), designing and building microprocessors especially for them would be prohibitively expensive, enough that the price of airplanes -- and airline tickets -- would shoot up.

This is where TEES comes in. TEES engineers are exploring ways to reprogram off-the-shelf microprocessors so the same chip that works in your desktop PC can carry out the wildly different tasks involved in flying airplanes. This is a good thing for everybody involved -- microprocessor manufacturers, airplane manufacturers and their suppliers, and us, Texans who fly.