Military Embedded Systems

EL SEGUNDO, California. Raytheon Australia has chosen Pacific Defense to deliver force-level electronic warfare (EW) systems for the Austrlian Army's LAND 555 Phase 6 program, Pacific Defense announced in a statement.

The military environment is unique when it comes to computing. You have space constraints, as well as concerns about how the harsh environments military systems typically operate in affect embedded computer systems. And the demands on computer systems are increasing all of the time as military customers seek more and more computing power. That's where the VPX backplane architecture comes in.

ATLANTA. Leveraging Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) strategies is the theme for the MOSA conference track at Aerospace Tech Week Americas being held November 8-9, 2022 at the JW Marriott Buckhead in Atlanta. Speakers such as C. Patrick Collier, co-founder of the SOSA Consortium, Jeff Howington of Collins Aerospace, and David Michelson, program manager for the Defense Innovation Unit’s (DIU’s) BlueUAS program highlight the MOSA agenda.

Welcome to the 2022 SOSA Special Edition, our second of what is an annual issue, highlighting editorial content on SOSA from the pages and website of Military Embedded Systems Magazine, as well as the products aligned and conformant to the technical standard – all put together exclusively by our staff. Learn about it all in the 2022 SOSA Special Edition!

The vision of hardware interoperability at the tactical edge, from air platforms to ground vehicles to base stations, is now being realized. Because MOSA [modular open systems approach] is an approach and not itself a standard, solutions that support this vision can be achieved through many different means as long as interfaces and communications protocols are based on open standards. There remains a key area to address, though, to achieve seamless interoperability between heterogeneous systems. Consider, for example, the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) Technical Standard: While most aspects of sensor processing system architectures are well-defined within SOSA, one area that has not been rigidly defined is the network configuration and operational environment of individual cards and modules.

For rugged DSP [digital signal processing] processor cards, it is important to have a balance between processor performance, memory bandwidth, I/O bandwidth, and ruggedization. Deficiencies in any of these attributes will limit the achievable performance. Due to limited real estate available on 3U OpenVPX boards, designers and users must make tradeoffs on which dimensions to maximize and/or minimize.

Following what has been a busy springtime returning to in-person military conferences and trade shows like the Sea-Air-Space Expo and SOFIC, launching our own virtual events, and keeping up with all the latest defense electronics news and trends like the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) modular open systems approach (MOSA) strategies, the summer slowdown has been sweet.

Pixus Technologies, a provider of embedded computing and enclosure solutions, has announced a new compact implementation of its ruggedized enclosure line utilizing NI’s Ettus Research™ brand Software Defined Radio (SDR).

WATERLOO, Ontario. Pixus Technologies engineers released a VITA 46.11 compliant chassis manager aligned to the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) Technical Sttandard that sits behind an OpenVPX backplane.

DAYTON, Ohio. Registration is live for the U.S. Air Force - FACE and SOSA Consortia Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) and expo being held on September 27, 2022 at the Dayton Convention Center in Dayton, Ohio. The event will feature expert presentations and demos by a cross-section of the defense community and industry on Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) and Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) related topics by a cross-section of the defense community, industry, and academia.