Blog Posts (older)
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Home front: Bridging the distance between the battlefield and America
VMENow.com is an E-site dedicated to “all things VME”, and VME is the most common type of embedded platform used in deployed military systems. It’s not such a stretch to imagine the platforms where VME is helping our armed forces prosecute the GWOT: in submarines, F/A-18s, M1A1s and M1A2s, AWACS, Global Hawks, Strykers, TACCs, MACCs [...]
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RFID Promises Enhanced Materiel Logistics
Ten years ago I attended a conference in Washington D.C. where a woman from the DLA described in excruciating detail the challenges of military materiel logistics. Today, with the DoD representing nearly 4% of the country’s GDP (on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars), keeping track of all of the military’s “stuff” is a Herculean task. Moreover, in wartime, getting goods from suppliers through domestic carriers like SeaLand trucks and rail cars, to civilian container ships, to foreign staging areas and finally to the battlefront is a challenge that not even the world’s largest retailer Walmart has to face. But the DoD and Walmart are both betting on the promise of RFID for enhanced goods shipment tracking.
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VME Pioneer Touts MicroTCA
Motorola today announced that it has achieved $1M in MicroTCA orders, making public its intention to grow its presence in telecom-related markets. Of particular interest is the fact that Motorola distributor and partner Arrow Electronics is quoted as saying (my emphasis is in bold): “We haven’t seen this kind of broad-based interest in a standard [...]
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Survivor: Global Economy – outwit, outplay, outinnovate
Techie types may not make the most dominant reality show contestants, but in the international marketplace, they’re becoming the power players.
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AMD and IBM Announce Low K Dielectric Breakthrough in Future 45nm ICs
Moore’s Law is getting some serious push-back by the atoms that make up transistors. As IC geometrics shrink below “deep sub-micron” down to 65nm and tomorrow’s 45nm line widths, punch through and leakage currents become the dominant term in the equation. Electrons like to tunnel through the gate into the substrate instead of moving across [...]
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December 7 Still Lives in Infamy
Some people may have missed the fact that yesterday was Pearl Harbor Day, the day in 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. But with the world a pretty scary place these days due to terrorism, rogue states like North Korea, and wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, is it really necessary to remember the event that kicked off the U.S. entry into World War II?
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It's Official: Radstone is now owned by GE Fanuc
Continuing its aggressive purchasing strategy, GE Fanuc Embedded Systems announced today that the acquisition of Radstone Technology is now complete. For a price of 130.4 million pounds (about $254.5 million), industry trail blazer Radstone joins the growing stable of GE’s embedded companies, which now include (in the order I can best remember): VMIC, Ramix, Condor [...]
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Rumsfeld’s Gone…Now What About Technology?
The CINC has spoken: the SECDEF will be replaced by Bob Gates, no stranger to Washington policy circles, the national intelligence community, nor to the Pentagon. Putting politics aside for a moment (well, mostly aside since they factor heavily into these discussions): What’s next for the DoD, the budget, and our embedded industry?
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Virtualization Technology...and LynuxWorks
At last week's GSPx (DSP) show in Santa Clara Intel gave a briefing on its new Virtualization Technology. VT isn't new: anyone in the IT world - or running a Mac with Bootcamp or Parallels - is familiar with the idea of running an OS within an OS. (My next laptop is going to be a Core 2 Duo PowerBook so I can run OS X and XP Pro (too wary of VISTA for now).
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Market research...again
[from VMEbus Systems October] In the past few months, I have seen two market research reports concerning VME. The numbers are different, and so are the growth rates. We do not do market research at VITA, so it would be suspect for us to contradict either without our own research to back up our opinions. [...]
