Virtualizing legacy embedded systems improves their performance, efficiency, and security, as well as helping to meet size, weight, and power requirements for military aircraft and ground vehicles.

This headline pretty much sums of much of what we cover and have covered since our first issue. We’ve focused on how open standards have driven open architectures in military systems, whether they are using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products or not.

Military users of signal processors seemingly want it all: parts that can process more data but be less detectable to the enemy, transmit data more quickly but don’t heat up from the effort, and operate at extremely powerful levels but are lightweight and ideally palm-sized. These requirements present an obvious challenge for engineers designing these processors for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) applications. The various solutions to these ISR demands involve artificial intelligence, machine learning, classification algorithms, and sensor fusion.

Military communications (MILCOM) has been the backbone for deployed soldiers since the Vietnam War. While these units have proven their capability and security for decades, the next generation of MILCOM platforms will need to leverage more modern communication technologies that have been developed to enable commercial platforms such as cellphones and Wi-Fi.

Each issue, the editorial staff of Military Embedded Systems will highlight a different charitable organization that benefits the military, veterans, and their families. We are honored to cover the technology that protects those who protect us every day. To back that up, our parent company – OpenSystems Media – will make a donation to every group we showcase on this page.

University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) researchers, together with scientists at the U.S. Army Research Office, developed a cyber agility framework to gauge the activity of cyberattackers and corresponding network protection over time. To detect and respond quickly to escalating cyberattacks, UTSA researchers developed this framework to “score” the agility of cyber attackers and defenders.

A simple but essential truth about military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) applications is that the sensor bandwidth and compute power needed to support them continuously increases. Today, for example, the Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) consortium is driving industry for data recorders that can support 100 Gb Ethernet with encryption to support the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) ISR roadmap.

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Burgeoning trends like autonomous automobiles, the Internet of Things (IoT), and increasingly sophisticated industrial and manufacturing devices, machines and systems are forcing change in the world of embedded systems. The old, purpose-built, closed legacy architectures are giving way to a fluid, software-defined, and connected approach.

In the eHPC (embedded high performance computing) market, developers are focused on domain-specific application development (e.g. radar processing, signal intelligence, autonomous driving). These domain-specific problems require substantial algorithm expertise (math, physics, etc.) not related to communication.

An A/D (Analog-to-Digital) converter, frequently abbreviated as ADC, accepts an analog voltage at the input and produces a digital representation of that voltage at the output that’s called a “sample”. The two primary characteristics of A/Ds are the rate of conversion or sampling rate, expressed in samples per second, and the accuracy of each digital sample expressed as the number of binary bits or decimal digits per sample.