Op-Eds

Comms

BAM BLOG: Counterfeits: the 2,000 versus 200 Equation - Blog

November 13, 2013

Before & AfterMarket Blog (BAM). At first glance, having 2,000 component suppliers to choose from -- versus 200 – is a good thing. Competition drives down prices and component selection appears bountiful. In the electronics supply chain, though, things don’t always work that way. In fact, the “2,000 vs. 200” equation is downright dangerous. Almost any vendor can sell a component, but not all vendors are authorized to do so. This is a big distinction.

Radar/EW

Six customized computers myths that you should know - Blog

November 04, 2013

William Finn AMREL Rugged Computers

One of the most common problems executives face is making business decisions about technologies with which they are not familiar. As they survey the crowded marketplace, corporate leaders often rely on information from self-interested vendors, or so-called conventional wisdom.

Comms

Collecting semiconductor products - Blog

October 21, 2013

John M. McHale III - Editorial Director, Military Embedded Systems

NEWBURYPORT, MA. I've found where they put the Lost Ark at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" -- it's in an aftermarket semiconductor warehouse in Newburyport, MA. Seriously, Rochester Electronics has a storage area for products going back decades that is eerily similar to the one in the movie (see photo).

Comms

HED: AS6081 - A Partial Solution When the Authorized Channel has no Solution - Blog

October 08, 2013

Daniel Deisz Rochester Electronics

Radar/EW

Designing OpenVPX systems to support Gen3 >10 Gbaud signaling - Blog

September 30, 2013

Bob Sullivan Curtiss-Wright

Signal Integrity (SI) is becoming an increasingly critical consideration for designers of OpenVPX systems. While system integrators first confronted some SI issues as the embedded industry made the performance advance from Gen1 at 3.125 Gbaud to Gen2 at 6.25 Gbaud signaling, the current transition to Gen3 >10 Gbaud signaling rates, nearly doubling the bandwidth of Gen2 OpenVPX, requires a significant increase in the level of tools, capability, expertise, and know-how to ensure successful design and implementation of a robust latest generation, OpenVPX system.

Comms

Code Quality: Improving testing for military-grade applications - Blog

September 18, 2013

Mark Pitchford LDRA Technology

Avionics

Ada Watch: Choosing the right Ada subset for strong static guarantees - Blog

August 13, 2013

Yannick Moy AdaCore

While Ada offers many features that act as safety guards at run time, by raising exceptions when a violation is detected, some of these features may be too complex to guarantee a safe execution before the program is run. This is the case for example of pointers, which may be used to create arbitrarily complex shared data structures in memory. SPARK is a subset of Ada that forbids these features, most notably pointers, in order to be able to provide strong guarantees at compile time. A preview of the next revision of SPARK called SPARK 2014 is already available, as well as the associated verification tools.

Avionics

Code Quality: Requirements traceability: Just as important as Design & Coding - Blog

July 01, 2013

Mark Pitchford LDRA Technology

Avionics

Code Quality: Dynamic & static analysis combined makes engineers & auditors happy - Blog

March 28, 2013

Mark Pitchford LDRA Technology

In the good old days, before writing software became “software engineering,” code development was a black art practiced by weird nerdy kids straight out of college. For them, coding was by no means a structured discipline. If you managed to get them to communicate, they might tell you that they were hacking code together and using ad hoc test data to see whether it did what it was supposed to do when they executed it.

Avionics

Ada Watch: Getting the right programming language for the job - Blog

March 05, 2013

Greg Gicca AdaCore

Ada is a strongly typed language that is a natural choice for developing high-reliability programs. Some languages such as C are good at low-level-programming but not for solving other challenges – as covered in my previous blog. You need to choose the right tool for the job. Instead of using one language or one tool for every problem, you should provide engineers with multiple options for developing high-reliability software – which is where Ada shines.

Avionics

Code Quality: Static analysis - essential for code quality, but not the silver bullet - Blog

November 26, 2012

Jim McElroy LDRA Technology

Avionics

Ada Watch: Choosing a programming language that supports reliability - Blog

November 20, 2012

Greg Gicca AdaCore

Radar/EW

HPEC Vanguard: New tools for complex algorithms - Blog

August 28, 2012

Eran Strod Curtiss-Wright

Arthur C. Clarke famously made the observation that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the radar and signal intelligence world, corps of Ph.Ds are regularly developing mathematically complex algorithms that require significantly more processing power than can be deployed in a contemporary embedded COTS system. These algorithms must sit gathering dust in a drawer until Moore’s Law has driven performance densities sufficiently to enable the needed compute power for that class of algorithm. When any given class of applications is made possible, more demanding algorithms follow in their wake. This way of understanding our market highlights the fact that there are two types of applications that embedded military and aerospace system designers typically confront.

Radar/EW

HPEC Vanguard: blogging on advances in HPEC technology in the embedded COTS defense & aerospace market - Blog

August 06, 2012

Eran Strod Curtiss-Wright

Welcome to the HPEC Vanguard blog. In this blog we will we endeavor to keep you informed about developments in technology, markets, industry standards and trends related to the adoption and use of commercial High Performance Computing (HPC) technology in the rugged embedded military market.

From The Editor

COTS is a bad word in rad-hard community - Blog

July 18, 2012

John M. McHale III - Editorial Director, Military Embedded Systems

MIAMI. Often a rad-hard supplier this week at the Nuclear Space Radiation Effects Conference (NSREC) in Miami would tell me his product is available off-the-shelf, but cringed at the notion that it would ever be considered COTS or commercial-off-the-shelf.