SOF WEEK 2024 -- TAMPA, Florida. Curtiss-Wright showcased their latest tactical communications solutions at SOF Week, including a modular radio center and a series of snap-together ultra-compact tactical communications and processing modules.

Aerospace and defense systems integrators continue to push for reductions in size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) to support advanced sensor/vetronics payloads onboard unmanned reusable and attritable platforms. Fortunately, advances in the miniaturization of mission-processor and network-switch subsystems are enabling designers of UAS (unmanned aerial system), UGV (unmanned ground vehicle), UUV (unmanned undersea vehicle), and USV (unmanned surface vehicle) platforms to expand their mission capabilities.

Every day, at peak operational times in the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Air Traffic Organization (ATO) handles approximately 5,400 aircraft flying in 29 million square miles of controlled airspace. When the growing number of uncrewed air systems (UASs) and other commercial and military uncrewed aircraft are also considered, the total number of aircraft flying daily over U.S. airspace significantly increases.

ASHBURN, Va. Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions offers the XMC-529 AMD Ultrascale+ MPSoC XMC mezzanine card, part of the company's line of Enhanced TrustedCOTS plug-in modules designed to bring addtionally secure processing to rugged deployed VPX-based systems. 

The incredible growth of processing parallelism has resulted in a corresponding explosion of performance and capabilities, but not all cores and threads are created equally. For mainstream computer users, such as the vast majority of Windows users, the detailed usage of cores and threads is not important for the user to understand. After editing a document, we hit the <SAVE> icon, and all the magic happens under the hood. But for designers of critical real-time processing systems, what happens under the hood matters. With a more detailed understanding of the latest hybrid core processor enhancements, military embedded systems designers – whether designing for land, sea, or air use – can build more deterministic and responsive processing systems and at the same time maintain better control over power consumption, resulting in SWaP [size, weight, and power] savings and longer-duration missions.

Today’s advanced military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms generate large amounts of highly sensitive data that must be captured and securely stored without impacting performance. System designers must ensure that data-capture systems can handle large amounts of data in as close to real time without interruption or bottlenecks that might otherwise affect performance. When this critical data is stored, it’s considered data-at-rest (DAR).

The ability to provide high-voltage power on ground vehicle platforms is a rapidly growing requirement as high peak power is often needed to accelerate a high-inertia load – such as a turret or a weapons system – to a precise position in the shortest possible time. Previously, the delivery of short bursts of peak power came with an associated risk of damage to the vehicle’s electrical systems. One alternative approach, which employs a higher current system, requires large banks of heavy batteries and large cable cross-sections and also wastefully produces large amounts of undesired heat.