In Brief

Feb. 1, 2003

Sarnoff licensing threat-response technology to homeland security companies

Leaders of the Sarnoff Corp. in Princeton, N.J., are licensing new capabilities for responding to emergencies and homeland security threats to homeland security providers, emergency management authorities, and corporate security managers. The capabilities combine live surveillance video with stored site models and add geographic information system location information and intelligence data, all in real time, Sarnoff officials say. Sarnoff experts have developed ways to create and store a 3-D video-based site model that gives surveillance staff the full context of any scene under observation, company officials say. This capability can superimpose live video from the scene onto the model to enable observers to "fly" around and through the scene as events unfold, and zoom in on points of interest. It blends geographic coordinates to pinpoint the location of activities of interest down to a specific floor of a building, adds real-time intelligence and sensor data to ensure good situational awareness, and stores video and data for later review and analysis. For more information contact Tom Lento at Sarnoff by phone at 609-734-3178, by fax at 609-734-2040, by e-mail at [email protected], by post at 201 Washington Road, CN5300, Princeton, N.J. 08543-5300, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.sarnoff.com/.

Northrop Grumman IT achieves SEI level-5 for software engineering

Auditors at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in Pittsburgh have recognized a unit of Northrop Grumman Corp. as one of the nation's top companies where it comes to writing software code. The Defense Enterprise Solutions unit of the Northrop Grumman Information Technology (IT) sector in Herndon, Va., won the SEI Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) system engineering/software engineering level 5 rating, which is the SEI's highest possible rating. The Northrop Grumman unit obtained the SEI level 5 rating "by enabling efficient integration of the company's system and software engineering processes as well as streamlining core and common processes across multiple programs," company officials say. Company managers applied the CMMI common framework to measurably improve the company's products and services, officials say. CMMI is the recognized standard developed by a coalition of industry, government, and the SEI to assess an organization's engineering capability. SEI is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon University. There are five levels of CMMI maturity, with the highest maturity level, level 5, indicating the lowest risk because of the better practices employed by the organization. For more information contact Northrop Grumman Information Technology by phone at 703-713-4000, by post at 2411 Dulles Corner Park, Suite 410, Herndon, Va. 20171, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.northropgrummanit.com/.

Pentek offers on-board Fibre Channel PowerPC VME board

Officials of Pentek Inc. in Upper Saddle River, N.J., are unveiling an on-board Fibre Channel VME board with several different I/O and real-time processing options. The Model 4205 board comes standard with a Motorola MPC7455 processor and two programmable Xilinx Virtex-II field programmable gate arrays. The baseboard has as many as two Velocity Interface Mezzanine-2 (VIM-2) modules, one VIM-4 module, or one VIM-2 and one PCI Mezzanine Card module. Systems designers could replace the Fibre Channel interface with future communications interfaces such as Gigabit Ethernet, Serial FPDP, and RapidI/O. The card is for engineers "who want our high-performance VIM I/O to capture signals, but don't need the computational power of a quad processor baseboard, or would like to use VIM in conjunction with PMC," says Pentek Vice President Rodger Hosking. For more information contact Pentek by phone at 201-818-5900, by fax at 201-818-5904, by e-mail at [email protected], by post at One Park Way, Upper Saddle River, N.J. 97458-2311, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.pentek.com/.

SBS unveils conduction-cooled PMC graphics module

SBS Technologies introduced a graphics-subsystem PCI mezzanine card (PMC), the conduction-cooled Sentiris S4110-CD00-AR, for military and extended-environment deployments, company officials say. SBS engineers developed the Sentiris-derivative products under an exclusive licensing agreement with Quantum3D Inc. of San Jose, Calif. "SBS re-engineered the air-cooled Sentiris product for conduction cooling. The conduction-cooled Sentiris offers the same high level of performance, low-power consumption, and feature set as the air-cooled model," says Clarence Peckham, President of the SBS Commercial and Government Group. Based on NVIDA's Quadro4 embedded graphics processing unit, Sentiris is an IEEE P1383.1-compliant PMC for applications such as avionics, vetronics, and embedded training. The S4110-CD00-AR is built with thermal layers, all I/O out PMC P4, no front panel or side connections, acrylic conformal coating, and supports operating temperatures from -40 85 degrees Celsius. It has a 128-bit interface to 64 megabytes of DDR memory, dedicated graphics bandwidth of 7 gigabits per second, and delivers 400 megapixels per second. For more information contact SBS by phone at 505-875-0600, by fax at 505-875-0400, by post at 2400 Louisiana, Blvd. NE, Suite 5-600, Albuquerque, N.M. 87110, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.sbs.com/.

North Atlantic introduces rugged power supply for military applications

Engineers at the North Atlantic Industries Logitek Power Division in Bohemia, N.Y., are offering a new high-density rugged VME plugpin power supply called the 55RQ1 for airborne, shipboard, and ground-mobile applications. The device accepts 28 volts DC according to MIL-STD 704D, and generates as many as five outputs to deliver 350 watts. Output voltages are 5 volts/30 amps, 12 volts/4 amps, and 3.3 volts/20 amps. Optional output voltages include 5 volts/2 amps, 24 volts/2 amps, or 28 volts/2 amps. The power supply, which operates at 100 percent power load in temperatures from -40 to 70 degrees Celsius, meets MIL-STD 461D for electromagnetic interference filtering and MIL-STD 704D for transient protection. For more information contact North Atlantic Industries by phone at 631-567-1100, by fax at 631-567-1823, by post at 170 Wilbur Place, Bohemia, N.Y. 11716-2416, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.naii.com/.

TRW to develop high-power laser

Experts at TRW in Redondo Beach, Calif., are developing an electrically powered solid-state laser that puts out 25-kilowatts of laser beam power for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to develop an electrically. The award is part of the Joint High-Power Solid-State Laser (JHPSSL) program that targets demonstration of the laser by the end of 2004. Military planners see the program as a step on the path to solid-state laser weapons that could be mounted on manned or unmanned aircraft, ships, or ground vehicles. Solid-state lasers simplify the logistics of installing and managing high-energy laser weapons systems. "This program will open the door to many new military applications for high-energy lasers, ranging from electronic warfare tasks such as blinding or destruction of enemy sensors to air defense or ship self-defense," says Jackie Gish, TRW director of directed energy technology and products. "TRW looks forward to developing these applications." Gish adds that the JHPSSL program will leverage the research and development in solid-state lasers TRW has conducted for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Air Force, and various other government and commercial enterprises. For more information on TRW contact the company on the World Wide Web at http://www.trw.com.

Imagix reverse-engineering software tool helps designers view UML diagrams

Leaders of Imagix Corp. in San Luis Obispo, Calif., are offering their Imagix 4.0 reverse-engineering, quality analysis, and documentation software tool that company officials say can help software engineers improve their understanding of existing source code. Imagix 4D 4.0 does this by helping software engineers view Unified Modeling Language (UML)-class diagrams with member-to-member associations. Imagix 4D 4.0 adds reverse-engineered UML class diagrams that include associations that show calls, set, reads, overrides, and type dependencies between class members. In addition to UML-class diagrams, Imagix 4D 4.0 adds equivalent file diagrams. For more information contact Imagix by phone at 805-781-6002, by fax at 805-781-6003, by e-mail at [email protected], by post at 6025 White Oak Lane, San Luis Obispo, Calif. 93401, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.imagix.com/.

Companies combine forces on software radio offering due this year

Officials of Sky Computers Inc. of Chelmsford, Mass., Interactive Circuits and Systems of Gloucester, Ontario, and SensorCom Inc. of Annapolis, Md., are joining forces to develop high-performance computing for software defined radio (SDR) applications. ICS will provide the analog-to-digital, digital-to-analog, and radio frequency (RF) capabilities; Sky will provide signal-processing subsystems; and SensorCom will add the applications software suite and final acceptance testing. SensorCom and Sky will market the new SDR systems, which will be available this spring. Software defined radio are useful for military and commercial applications. The current trend is to perform analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion as close to the antenna as possible. This SDR approach, which allows arbitrary selection of intermediate frequency (IF), bandwidth, modulation, and coding scheme is especially important to military customers as they can "frequency hop" to find secure channels of communication or to lock onto signals of interest to electronic intelligence.

DARPA selects BAE Systems to lead C4ISR program

Officials at The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., have selected BAE Systems to lead the Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration phase for its Adaptive Joint C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, and Computer, Intelligence and Reconnaissance) Node (AJCN) program. BAE Systems Information & Electronic Warfare Systems (IEWS) in Nashua, N.H., received initial funding as prime contractor for the program. IEWS will provide management and systems engineering leadership and will lead the signals intelligence, electronic attack, and systems integration efforts. AJCN, formerly the Airborne Communications Node, will provide a scaleable, multi-functional, multi-mission communications, signals intelligence, and electronic attack payload that can be reconfigured to perform a variety of functions in the same processing hardware. The U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force will be key users of the C4ISR node. BAE Systems will design, build, and deliver four flyable payloads that provide the warfighter with communications relay and bridging, signals intelligence and electronic attack. Two payloads will be flight-tested on the Army's Hunter unmanned air vehicle and the other two will be flight-tested aboard either an Air Force KC-135 or RC-135 aircraft. For more information contact BAE Systems IEWS on the World Wide Web at http://www.baesystems-iews.com.

U.S. R&D spending to increase to $302 billion in 2003, Battelle says

Research and development in the United States should increase by 3.4 percent to $302 billion this year, compared to 2002, say experts at the research firm Battelle in Columbus, Ohio. One key factor in the increase is the continued domination of industrial research and development, researchers say. These predictions are in a report compiled by Battelle and R&D Magazine in Morris Plains, N.J. From 2002 to 2003, the report predicts, federal R&D spending will increase by 10.5 percent to $89 billion, industrial R&E spending will increase 0.13 percent to $194 billion, and university spending will increase by 7 percent to $18 billion. Driving federal R&D spending will be communications, intelligence, surveillance, smart weapons, intelligence gathering and interpretation, and responses to chemical and biological warfare, the report states. Retarding growth in industrial spending, meanwhile, are uncertainties in the stock market, according to the report. For more information contact Battelle's Jean Hayward by phone at 614-424-7039, by e-mail at [email protected], by post at 505 King Ave., Columbus, Ohio 43201-2693, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.bettelle.org/.

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