Military funding – not only for traditional long-life missions but also for nontraditional shorter life, lower-cost small satellite applications – continues to grow. Radiation-hardened component designers are working to meet the reduced size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) demands of these new missions while maintaining radiation tolerance and dealing with the supply-chain headaches that continue to plague the electronics industry.

Standards-driven product innovation creates a symbiotic relationship between systems integrators and technology developers. As new component-level technologies are introduced, they enable faster, lower-cost, and improved SpaceVPX (VITA 78.0) platform implementations. SpaceVPX systems that utilize these new technologies will have an increased adoption and deployment rate, creating improved development investment returns for the component suppliers while enabling accelerated deployment and usage of the integrated SpaceVPX systems.

High-precision analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are an integral part of many satellites and other systems used in space. It is important to understand how such devices respond in the harsh environment of space, where heavy ions may repeatedly strike. A detection algorithm can adequately identify single-event effects (SEE) – namely, single-event transients (SET) and single-event functional interrupts (SEFI) – in low-speed precision SAR [successive approximation register] ADCs without user-configurable registers. This information can be used to adequately determine the suitability of an ADC for space applications.

Enthusiastic crowds were a theme at each show I attended over the last six months, as folks were eager to be back among their defense industry colleagues, clients, and partners. None were more excited than attendees at the annual Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC) in Tampa, Florida, a show put on by the National Defense Industries Association (NDIA). Navigating the exhibition aisles of that show was like trying to walk through a crowded bar, as this was SOFIC’s first in-person get-together since 2019.

Space 2.0 represents a major shift in the development of defense and aerospace applications: With artificial intelligence (AI) applications moving aboard, systems must support higher processing and throughput capabilities. On-orbit processing requires an adaptive architecture so that systems can process, analyze, and reconfigure themselves to optimize performance and responsiveness. This, in turn, is driving innovation in organic packaging and reliability. Finally, to build these complex systems, engineers need greater design agility to accelerate development, maintain lower costs, and achieve faster time-to-launch.

Many defense and aerospace processing systems are upgraded or refreshed rather than replaced for cost efficiency and to reduce out-of-service time.

Overlooking thermal design in today’s truck-mounted advanced driver assistance systems can cripple performance, cause critical safety problems, and expose vehicle operators and vendors to liability. 

The guidance document DO-178 “Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification”1 2 was first published in 1982, re-written in 1992 as DO-178B and updated in 2011 as DO-178C, to reflect the experience accrued to meet today’s aviation industry needs.