We get this question a lot from customers:
“Is this product certified to MIL-STD (-901D, -167, -810F/G, -461E/F, -704F, etc.)?”
And our answer is usually no, but that product is built to meet MIL-STD-XXX. Here’s why.
In our 48+ years of experience serving defense, industrial, marine, and other markets that require rugged display products, we’ve learned that what works for one customer might not necessarily work for the next. As a result, we’ve developed a modular approach to design. This allows us to swap out components and make other iterations to a baseline product, tailoring it to your exact requirements.
Need this display but a different video controller? Maybe a heater to work in frigid environments? DC instead of AC power? No problem.
The result is that we have over 120,000,000 potential configurations our customers can order. That’s a lot of options—and testing each and every permutation would be prohibitively expensive. Moreover, many of our products are components of a larger integrated solution, which the end-customer may be required to test as a full system instead of just our piece.
So how do we justify saying our products are built to meet specific military standards?
We’ve spent countless hours supporting and observing our products being tested at certification houses. This gives us valuable insight into the design solutions that successfully pass, providing us with knowledge that can be leveraged when building subsequent iterations. We do have certifications for base models of many of our product families, and additional customer-provided reports that are available upon request. For specific configurations, we typically perform something called “confidence testing” in-house for iterations built to meet a specific standard but not formally qualified.
This testing can include:
- Altitude testing in our vacuum chamber
- Temperature/Humidity in our Thermotron Oven
- Submersion in our Dunk Tank
- Photometric testing
- Electromagnetic Interference in our shielded EMI room
- And more
So you can rest assured that just because a product might not be formally certified, if you bought it from General Digital, it’s gone through a rigorous, ISO 9001:2015 certified quality management process and can withstand the harshest environments on (or off) Earth. And if you do need formal testing for your unit, we have long-standing relationships with third-party testing houses that are more than able to fulfill that requirement for you.