John McHale Editorial Director

Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) continue to shrink in size, as do their payloads, requiring system designers to leverage small-form-factor, embedded-computing standards like PC/104, COM Express, and others.

Brandon Lewis, Technology Editor

The automotive industry, just now entering the age of artificial intelligence (AI), is looking at the issues of vehicle safety and training for the future of autonomous vehicles. In this Q and A with Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at NVIDIA, he discusses how deep learning technology is being put to use in the pursuit of fully autonomous vehicles, which NVIDIA forecasts as perhaps closer than you might think.

Charlotte Adams Abaco Systems

Sensor platforms are proliferating around the edges of the network in both the civilian and the military spheres. For examples, think of the remote devices on buses, trucks, and oil rigs that are monitored via the Internet of Things (IoT) or the unmanned surveillance nodes in the network-centered warfare infrastructure. To be effective, these "edge" devices need to be as self-sufficient as possible, not just in processing capability but also in energy use.

John McHale Editorial Director

Regardless of which military trade show I attend or what military application is being discussed at a show, the common trend is that everything is getting smaller, whether it's GPS systems, avionics computers, unmanned aircraft system (UAV) payloads, etc. This trend bodes well for suppliers to the military of small-form-factor standards such as PC/104, COM Express, or SMARC.

John McHale Editorial Director

While PC/104 has been around for decades it has never been healthier. Its main advantages - ruggedness, compact size, and modularity - have never been more in demand in the military electronics market, especially in unmanned systems.

Stephen St. Amant PC/104 Consortium President

PC/104 had a strong showing at the recent Embedded World 2016 trade show in Nuremberg, Germany. Slick PC/104 demonstrations showed robust graphics processing, industrial Internet of Things (IoT) gateways, innovative Ethernet switches, ARM/FPGA combinations, and military/industrial control applications. At the board level, PC/104 modules are easily recognized for their general shape, corner mounting holes, and stackable bus connectors, but the trade show floor held more than just board-level PC/104: It was at work inside all sorts of enclosure formats - from cubelike configurations housing a stack of modules, to low-profile flat configurations using PC/104 cards as mezzanines, to ultracompact palm-sized systems.

John McHale Editorial Director

Now as SWaP requirements become more prevalent in military electronics system designs, PC/104’s place in this market is more secure than ever.

Eric Rossi EMAC, Inc

Most folks in the ARM embedded world are familiar with names like Raspberry PI, BeagleBone, Xplained, etc. These boards, as well as a whole host of others from various ARM board manufacturers, have enticing price points that lure us into considering them for use in production products. This class of board is designed and built to showcase or evaluate a new hardware platform, thus labeling them evaluation boards or development kits. Determining if it would be prudent to use a commodity evaluation board for production depends on your application.

Pushek Madaan, Cypress Semiconductor and Gagan Luthra, Cypress Semiconductor

Increasing time-to-market pressures have led to the availability of full-featured microcontrollers, sometimes called system-on-chip (SoC) processors. These feature-rich microcontrollers or SoCs speed design by integrating a part of or, in some cases, all of the hardware required to implement an embedded design. Developers can then focus their design efforts on application-level functionality.

Christian Eder, congatec

"Stop – you have reached your destination." With increasing traffic in healthcare centers, clinics face many challenges. Ultrasound-guided devices can allow clinicians without ultrasound expertise to easily integrate sonography into their workflow for needle placement, cannulas, and other invasive medical devices and procedures. Battery-powered, high-computing-power portable imaging systems allow for increased medical device flexibility, effectiveness, and safety.