Military Embedded Systems

As technologies evolve, government defense organizations steadily evolve electronic warfare (EW) solutions to counteract and then surpass capabilities of their adversaries by leapfrogging each other in an ongoing mission imperative to maintain dominance. Essential functions of EW systems are acquiring RF [radio frequency] signals of interest and then performing the required signal-processing tasks to deliver an effective response. This fosters new technologies and architectures that boost performance levels in both operations.

Modern aerospace and defense platforms, especially in the growing field of unmanned vehicles, need more processing capability for compute-intense applications including AI, sensor processing, and fusion in avionics, that can be easily refreshed with new technology to meet new threats while keeping costs down and speeding time to market. Simplifying integration using an open architecture approach facilitates better affordability, scalability, interoperability, and sustainability across the entire military embedded ecosystem.

Maintaining a tactical advantage in EW (electronic warfare) has become one of the highest priorities for defense organizations. Ongoing development of innovative strategies and evolution of technologies are necessary to counter new threats and to exploit new targets.

Electronic warfare (EW) not only plays a dominant role in worldwide defense capabilities, but it also must evolve rapidly to counter new threats and take advantage of new technology. Each advance must take into account the ever-changing system design landscape.

Since the 1994 Perry directive to use COTS [commercial off-the shelf] components, virtually all defense and intelligence organizations have been seeking standards-based solutions for electronic equipment and systems. However, even without that mandate, government customers have come to recognize the commonsense benefits of open standards to take advantage of the latest technology, shorten procurement cycles, and foster competitive pricing. Instead of simply trying to comply with procurement policies, these large government organizations are now actively pursuing and promoting new standards to align with current and future mission requirements. More than simply new standards, these initiatives present a new paradigm of system architectures that can efficiently evolve to accommodate new threats and changing requirements, without starting over from scratch each time.

Open architecture embedded systems for military/aerospace applications have always relied on mezzanine or daughter cards to provide flexibility and modularity because they are very effective in handling the large variety of I/O functions required. Thanks to widespread adoption of industry standards defining these mezzanine products, carrier boards are able to accept mezzanine boards from a wide range of vendors, each specializing in niche technologies and interfaces.

The use of software radio technology has spread to almost every commercial, consumer, government, industrial, and military platform across the entire radio frequency spectrum during the technology's 25-year lifespan. Innovations in data converter technology, DSP devices, system interconnects, processors, software, design tools, and packaging techniques have improved performance levels and reduced the size, weight, and power consumption of software radio systems. However, the rapid surge in software radio applications spawned ad hoc, proprietary interfaces between the elements in these systems.

Advances in optical interface technology boost performance levels to help meet increasing data rates and signal bandwidths. New specifications define how to deploy these optical links within open industry standards, affording improved interoperability and supporting future upgrades. Offering many advantages over traditional copper connections, optical links will boost data rates, improve signal integrity and security, and greatly extend distance between system components.

Software radio technology has been steadily evolving during the last 25 years from a laboratory curiosity to widespread deployment in virtually every commercial, consumer, government, industrial, and military platform across the entire radio-frequency spectrum. A constant stream of innovations in data-converter technology, DSP devices, system interconnects, processors, software, design tools, and packaging techniques continuously boosts performance levels and reduces the size, weight, cost, and power of software radio systems. This rapid explosion of applications is characterized by ad-hoc, proprietary interfaces between each element of the system. An evolving standard, nicknamed VRT, offers a consistent protocol for these interconnections to improve interoperability, maintainability, and upgradability.

New technology offers engineers of Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems diverse opportunities to apply digital signal processing much closer to the antenna than ever before. Various strategies include the latest wideband data converters, monolithic receiver chips, compact RF tuners, and remote receiver modules using gigabit serial interfaces. Each approach presents benefits and tradeoffs that must be considered in choosing the optimal solution for a given application.

The latest Virtex-7 FPGAs from Xilinx deliver significant benefits for radar systems compared to previous-generation devices. Higher-density silicon with lower power consumption, more resources, faster interfaces, and more and faster memory not only enhances performance, it also opens new application spaces.