Articles
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The short life cycles of commercial components create many obsolescence headaches for military electronic-system designers as they try to integrate these high-performance devices into air, ground, sea platforms that must last for decades, that have long system development cycles, and time-consuming testing procedures. As the military looks to leverage more open architectures and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology, the challenge of managing the obsolescence that comes with COTS will only become more difficult.
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UAS payloads, radar best bets for military electronics market
"Uncertainty" best describes the current outlook for the U.S. military market, with the next president's positions still somewhat unclear, as is the nation's future defense outlook.Regardless of inertia or doubt in Washington, military program managers and industry engineers must continue to keep the current defense electronics systems in air, ground, and sea platforms running efficiently to ensure continuing military readiness. Moreover, key radar, unmanned, electronic warfare, and other systems must still be modernized. All of this means that opportunities still exist for embedded electronics suppliers.
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ARMed and ready
While the rest of the engineering world has been developing embedded systems using the ARM microcontroller unit (MCU) architecture for many years, the high-reliability (hi-rel) market has been slow to adopt it. That is a pity because the biggest benefi...
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A go-to embedded solution
There was a time when I watched the cooking competition television show "Chopped" somewhat regularly. It's an intense ingredients-based culinary challenge that pushes chefs to their limits under strict time constraints. Amidst the nearly endless food combinations available to the contestants, it seems as though every episode I watched included one person (and sometimes two or three) who used mascarpone cheese. Often in the dessert round, the chef's storytelling voiceover (dripping with tension) would recount, "I ran to the pantry. I grabbed the mascarpone ... "
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PC/104 architecture maintains relevance in a competitive field
PC/104 is into its third decade, standing the test of time, while myriad form factors of yesteryear have faded into irrelevance. So why is PC/104 so persistent? How has it survived? The simple answer for me is the tireless work of the consortium that lies behind its continued success. A collaboration of companies with a common vision, it was formed in 1992 with 12 members but now has almost triple that. The PC/104 Consortium ensures PC/104's continued relevance. The spine of a PC/104 stack is the desktop-derived peripheral bus, arguably the key evolution since 1992 (Figure 1).
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FPGA coprocessors for acceleration of shape recognition algorithms in hybrid VPX HPEC systems
To reach the level of performance requested by the latest military specifications, electronic warfare (EW) systems designers rely more and more on VPX high-performance embedded computing (HPEC) platforms. To handle the global IP traffic growth - predicted to reach 132 exabytes (EB) per month in 2018, according to Cisco's Visual Network Index - electronic systems must manage the data flow in and out of the semiconductor devices. Designers of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have developed devices offering high bandwidth and performance with very high-speed interfaces that can bring superior parallel processing power. This reality enables the design of high-performance hybrid HPEC systems that can be used for such demanding applications as ultrafast shape-recognition systems.
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Unmanned aircraft leverage PC/104, COM Express, and other small form factors
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.
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Cool power sensation
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.
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Next-gen tactical Ethernet switches
Ethernet technology is the common denominator for communications between networks and is a foundational building block of IP networks. This lingua franca of the networking world also has evolved to meet the needs of the tactical environment; it is found on tanks, ships, submarines, manned aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
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PC/104 a presence at Embedded World 2016
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
Stephen St. Amant, PC/104 Consortium President
Rory Dear, European Editor/Technical Contributor
John McHale, Editorial Director
Stephen St. Amant, PC/104 Consortium President