Military Embedded Systems

GEORGETOWN, Texas. Rugged electronics manufacturer AirBorn launched its new VPX power supply, which is a SOSA aligned intelligent VPX power supply with a maximum output power upwards of 2000 watts. 

Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled autonomous systems have revolutionized military operations and modern warfare. These uncrewed systems are well-suited for dangerous and repetitive tasks, enhancing situational awareness and logistical capabilities while reducing risks to human personnel. However, their growing role raises significant security concerns: Uncrewed vehicles rely heavily on machine learning (ML) and can be vulnerable to cyberattacks that could jeopardize missions, troops, and critical technologies. While no system is unhackable, system architecture becomes critical in ensuring a device is as resilient as possible to cyberattack not just on the day of initial deployment but several years into its product life cycle. Because of this, robust safeguards are necessary throughout their development and deployment life cycles. Secure design principles, encryption, access controls, and secure communications can harden these systems against unauthorized access.

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.

SCOTTSDALE, AZ. Jason Dirner – MOSA Chief Engineer, MOSA Management Office , Engineering & Systems Integration (ESI) Directorate, U.S. Army DEVCOM C5ISR Center, will keynote the MOSA Virtual Summit, being held Feb 27 at 11 am Est. Other sessions include: Leveraging MOSA for C5ISR, Electronic Warfare, and Radar Applications; MOSA at the Edge — C5ISR Sensors Across Multiple Domains;  and MOSA Strategies for Military Aviation Platforms.

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. 

This week’s product, the CAES TORNADO Direct-to-Digital Data Converter, is designed to meet bandwidth and form factor requirements for radar, electronic warfare (EW), signals intelligence (SIGINT), and C4ISR applications.

Engineers at Echodyne have enhanced the capability of small radars for military applications such a counter-UAS [uncrewed aircraft system]. In a podcast I did with Tom Driscoll, co-founder and CTO of Echodyne, he and I discussed how his team’s metamaterials electronically scanned array (MESA) radar system does things that traditional active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar systems cannot, the company’s unique business model, and how it leverages commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components like Xilinx FPGAs [field-programmable gate arrays]. Tom also shared details about his background in metamaterials and how he once designed an RF invisibility cloak using them. Edited excerpts follow.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 kicked off a new era of modern warfare. Drone strikes, hypersonic missiles, and the use of a wide spectrum of other weapons introduced the world to new threats on the battlefield. Radar systems are stretching their limits to keep up.

Pixus Technologies, a provider of embedded computing and enclosure solutions, has announced a new chassis platform in the ATR form factor that is aligned to the SOSA Technical Standard. It offers supplemental airflow through the chassis sidewalls and a front loaded configuration.

HARRISBURG, Pa. Connectivity and sensor company TE Connectivity launched a new line of connectors: a family of VITA 87/SOSA [Sensor Open Systems Architecture] conformant high-density circular MT connectors, aimed at enabling higher density for next-generation embedded systems in a variety of areas.