Articles
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Trend predictions during an election year are extremely challenging, especially in the circus election that is going on in the United States right now. By the time you read this, it will all be over, and there is a good chance that I may be headed to Australia for a few years! Here goes my attempt to share a few highlights for what developments I expect to unfold in the market next year.
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VITA Standards Organization activity updates
The September VITA Standards Organization (VSO) meeting was held in Germantown, Maryland, and hosted by DRS Technologies. This update is based on the results of that meeting. Contact VITA if you are interested in participating in any of these working groups. Visit the VITA website (www.vita.com) for details on upcoming VSO meetings.
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Leveraging VPX experience aids development of secure, rugged rackmount servers
New ATX-class server draws from VPX technology experience in designing for security and ruggedness requirements.
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Rally 'round technology roadmaps
Editorial Director Jerry Gipper describes the purpose of technology roadmaps and explains which factors are driving roadmaps in the VITA market space.
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FACE conformance program
September 2016 marked a major milestone along the long road to avionics software standardization: the last essential component of the system developed by U.S. Navy and Army aviation authorities and their suppliers clicked into place.
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Backup PNT methods are essential for GPS-denied environments
Backup methods of position, navigation, and timing (PNT) are essential for warfighters operating within GPS-denied environments. Warfighters rely on the U.S. NAVSTAR global positioning system (GPS) and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) for military operations, but are encountering an intense escalation of jamming and spoofing attacks.
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Technology insertion: Balancing performance and stability
Embedded computing systems have benefited enormously from the flood of innovation in the electronics industry: Military programs over the years have enjoyed ever faster processors, smaller form factors, and steadily declining prices per unit of performance.
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Implementing FACE-conformant avionics systems
The Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) is a government/industry/academia initiative started by U.S. Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) and the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center (AMRDEC) in 2010 to create a standard for avionics application development. The goal of FACE is to lower the cost and amount of time necessary to create open systems applications and promote reusable applications across multiple platforms. To facilitate collaboration with industry and academia, The Open Group created the FACE Consortium for the purpose of developing, publishing, and administering conformance to the specification. Besides NAVAIR and Army, to date more than 90 companies and over 1,175 members involved in the avionics sector have joined the FACE Consortium. Most recently, in 2016, the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) officially joined FACE, rounding out the participation of the entire US military services. Today each military branch has and continues to require FACE in their proposals for any future capabilities.
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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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Very high-speed sampling and serial ADCs in embedded systems
Latest-generation active electronically scaled array (AESA) radar systems can have thousands of TX/RX modules. High bandwidth is needed to connect each array element data converter to the FPGAs that process incoming and generate outgoing data streams. New software-defined radio systems use advanced reconfigurable modulation schemes that increase channel bandwidths and deliver unprecedented wireless data rates. To increase the performance of software radio and electronic warfare systems, it has become critical to use efficient, low-power, low-pin-count, FPGA-connected converter interfaces.
Wayne McGee, Creative Electronics Systems (CES)
