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Aerospace

UPS Devices Keep UAVs in the Air

The simplistic definition of UAV reads like this: “An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), colloquially known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot on board. Its flight is controlled either autonomously...

Articles

Electronics & Computers

iSLC Flash Technology

Robots have been employed by the military to assist in missions where it would be, and has been, too dangerous to have a human being take on the task. These robots can detect and disable bombs. Some can be thrown into...

Articles

Test & Measurement

CompactPCI Steps Into the Future

CompactPCI Serial has proven to be a beneficial technology upgrade for a number of embedded systems designers accustomed to working with the legacy CompactPCI platform. Not only does CompactPCI Serial bring...

Articles

Electronics & Computers

The Evolution of AdvancedTCA: From telecommunications to military, aerospace and security

The Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA® or ATCA®) is a series of open standard computing platform specifications originally ratified...

Articles

Aerospace

Eyes In The Sky

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are critical to today’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions, supplying valuable aerial imagery to ground forces. Small UAV systems are a highly flexible ISR solution...

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Aerospace

Point-of-Load Power Management

The requirements for smaller size, lower weight, and reduced cost in space and defense systems are driving demands for improved power-management solutions. Integrated DCto- DC converters that are designed for...

Articles

Test & Measurement

Phoning It In: Making Smartphones Secure Enough for Tactical Communications

You suddenly find yourself pinned down by enemy gunfire. What do you do? Whip out your smartphone and call for an airstrike? Yes, if the U.S. Marine Corps has its way.

Articles

Electronics & Computers

Small Form Factor Computers Go Ultra-low Power

Agrowing number of mobile, space constrained or harsh environment applications are being designed for the military, industrial automation/HMI, digital signage and medical markets that are driving...

Articles

RF & Microwave Electronics

Improving Signal to Noise Ratios in Defense Electronics

As a vertical market, “defense electronics” encompasses a huge range of systems, from portable communications to transportation, avionics, and shipborne radar. While the power...

Briefs

Software

Crumple Zone Software Absorbs Attack Effects Before System Failures

A higher level of structural and operational endurance and ruggedness can be achieved in software systems by strategically introducing crumple zones (CZs) in the system...

Briefs

Software

General Runtime/Architecture for Many-core Parallel Systems (GRAMPS)

The era of obtaining increased performance via faster single cores and optimized single-thread programs is over. Instead, a major factor in new processors’ performance comes from parallelism: increasing numbers of cores per processor and threads per core. In both research and...

Application Briefs

Defense

Buoy System Tracks Ships in Real Time

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the nation’s 360 ports and waterways remain especially vulnerable to attack from small vessels carrying improvised explosive devices, including...

Articles

Aerospace

Solving the Power/Energy Paradox for High-Power Defense Applications

While often used interchangeably, power and energy are not the same. Energy is the capacity to perform and power is the rate at which that capacity is exercised — the rate...

Articles

Aerospace

Optimizing High Reliability Power Distribution System Designs

As the performance requirements of avionics, military, and space electronic systems increase, so do the demands on the power supplies for these systems. Successful system designs...

Articles

Aerospace

System Interconnects for Today’s Military Vehicles

Continuous improvements in on-board systems are required for military vehicles, because the types of threats they face are always changing. Enemies keep adapting their high-tech...

Articles

RF & Microwave Electronics

A Fundamental Key to Next-Generation Directed-Energy Systems

Imagine an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) unit on a routine scouting patrol deep in the notorious “Triangle of Death” south of Baghdad, where marines, sailors, and soldiers...

Articles

Electronics & Computers

VPX-SC N-dimensional Supercomputing Architectures Come To The Critical Embedded Systems Market

From the first computers of the 1940s through the machines of the 1990s, all computer systems were CPUbound. In other words, the I/O interfaces could...

Application Briefs

Software

SWORD Simulation Software

MASA Group, a developer of Artificial Intelligence (AI)- based Modeling & Simulation (M&S) software for the defense, public safety, emergency management, and serious games markets, has launched SWORD 5.0, the...

Application Briefs

Electronics & Computers

Rugged Processors and Ethernet Switches

GE (Towcester, UK) will be supplying General Dynamics UK with subsystems required for the Demonstration Phase of the Scout Specialist Vehicle family of platforms being designed for the British Army. The...

Articles

Electronics & Computers

VPX: The State of the Ecosystem

You can never have too much bandwidth. High-speed processing and growing amounts of data to be communicated require generous bandwidth from the board level to the I/O. VPX, with a backplane connector system...

Articles

Electronics & Computers

Embedded Video Requirements Drive New Mezzanine Card Format

Sophisticated graphics have hit the embedded systems world and are increasingly demanded by military, aerospace, industrial, and medical applications. The problem, of course, is that...

Application Briefs

Defense

Computer RTOS

Software Controls Vehicle’s Mission-Critical Computers General Dynamics UK recently specified Green Hills Software’s INTEGRITY® real-time operating system (RTOS) as the operating system software for all of the...

Articles

RF & Microwave Electronics

Architecture of the Air Force Satellite Control Network

The Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) is a worldwide network of ground stations that supports a variety of users from NASA to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The...

Briefs

Electronics & Computers

CMOS-Memristor Hybrid Nanoelectronics

The memristor is the fourth fundamental passive electronic device in addition to the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. By integrating with complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) devices, memristors show promise for development of revolutionary new nanoelectronic computing architectures with...

Briefs

Electronics & Computers

Dynamically Reconfigurable Software-Defined Radio for GNSS Applications

Historically, the military has used special- purpose Global Positioning System (GPS) radios for radio navigation. This has the disadvantage of locking users into fixed technology solutions designed to meet a fixed set of requirements. Software Defined Radios (SDR) have the...

Briefs

Information Technology

Two-Way, Freeform, Speech-to-Speech Translation Systems for Tactical Use

The Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) is developing and fielding freeform, two-way translation systems that enable speakers of different languages to communicate with one another in real-world tactical situations without an...

Articles

Electronics & Computers

Designing High-Speed, Rugged Data Recorders

High-speed recorders represent a major share of electronic instrumentation found in commercial, industrial, scientific research, government, and defense applications. Each system captures specific...

Articles

Test & Measurement

Using Software Defined Instruments to Address the Mixed-Signal Test Challenges of Today’s Software Defined Radios

Software Defined Radio (SDR) represents an important move forward for mobile and personal communications, promising a major...

Briefs

Electronics & Computers

Wide-Field Imaging System and Rapid Direction of Optical Zoom

A breadboard system has been developed for demonstrating nonmechanical zoom using flexible thin films. The project consists of three major task areas: material characterization,...