Technology focus, 1 May 2011. For network-centric operations to succeed on today’s digital battlefield, efficient, reliable, and real-time communications are crucial to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. The antenna is one of the most important, if not often overlooked, component of aerospace and defense systems. Military applications combine the need for high performance and reliability with some of the hardest environmental conditions.

Special report -- Preferences among systems are divided for EW and SIGINT systems on the most efficient ways to implement digital signal processing. The battle lines are drawn among field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs,) general-purpose processors (GPPs), and the new breed of graphics processing units (GPUs). The challenge of signal processing for electronic warfare and signals intelligence applications revolves around the sequence of events that happen in transforming raw RF signals at an antenna into useful information for fighting forces to use as they take some sort of action. To be effective, this sequence must be fast and efficient.

Product Intelligence -- The era of the widespread stand-alone input/output (I/O) board apparently is coming to an end, embedded computing industry experts say, as systems designers increasingly rely on mezzanine boards for the vast majority of their applications. At the same time, however, the stand-alone I/O board still has utility for specialized applications, such as placing many different I/O schemes on a single board, or for handling blazingly fast, specialized I/O for the most demanding applications, such as radar processing, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence, experts say.

Technology focus -- Optical components and systems benefit aerospace and defense applications with high speed, low weight, and increased security. The requirement for compact, lightweight, low-power electronics -- exacerbated by the growing demand for greater data throughput and bandwidth -- is driving the use of optical technologies in military and aerospace applications. Optical components and systems are increasingly being investigated, as well as adopted, by aerospace and defense engineers for a wealth of land, sea, air, and space applications.

Special report -- Whether tethered to the ground or floating for months and weeks at a time, manned and unmanned lighter-than-air vehicles packed with large electro-optic payloads are a key weapon in the U.S. military’s surveillance arsenal. Going back as far as the American Civil War, lighter-than-air vehicles -- airships, hot air balloons, and aerostats -- have performed a variety of missions for the military.

Product Intelligence -- Aerospace and defense systems integrators increasingly are demanding digital power control in advanced electronics for a wide variety of reasons, among them ease of reconfigurability, flexibility and low costs of design, and the ability to prognosticate the status and life cycles of power-management components.

Technology Focus -- Real-time operating system software is more important today than it has ever been before, as systems designers depend on the RTOS to handle increasingly complex software structures and functionality, reliability, security, and more.

Special report -- U.S. Navy projects to build a variety of surface warships are on track, despite several different cutbacks, which is good news for suppliers and integrators of shipboard electronics who are looking forward to a wealth of new projects, systems upgrades, and technology insertion.

Special report -- No new military helicopters are in the U.S. Army's plans for the near future, so Army leaders are looking into avionics upgrades and technology insertion to keep their existing chopper fleets flying well into the next decade.

Technology focus -- As the complexity, requirements, and criticality of avionics software grow, innovative tools are increasingly necessary to test, verify, and secure military and aerospace systems.

Product intelligence -- Information security, advanced FPGA programming tools, and increasing specialization for an ever-broadening number of potential applications are primary trends in today's field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology for aerospace and defense.

Product intelligence -- Blending infrared sensors with electro-optical sensors for multispectral sensing and imaging, improved resolution of IR sensors to match visible-light sensors, and adding laser range finders are technological research goals of today's military infrared sensors designers.

Special report -- Designers of next-generation aircraft cockpits rely heavily on human factors when creating future synthetic and enhanced vision applications, as well as flight decks, for commercial and military aircraft cockpits.

Technology focus -- The need for increased information and processing in the field is driving the need for rugged computer systems and components able to withstand extreme environments.

Top stories of 2010 -- Real-time embedded computing for aerospace and defense applications saw many changes in 2010, and one of the most notable involved the industry shift to the Intel Core i7 microprocessor after rival Freescale Semiconductor discontinued -- at least temporarily -- support for AltiVec floating-point processing capability in its latest QorIQ processors.

Special report -- Air traffic management for commercial aviation now is radar-based and managed by ground controllers, but the Federal Aviation Administration and industry are ushering in a next-generation air transport system that relies on satellites for air traffic control on the flight deck.

Product intelligence -- The growing use in aerospace and defense electronic systems of smart power management is enhancing the efforts of electronic systems designers not only to enhance power system health monitoring, but also is helping them push the bounds of power capacity and device efficiency, and shrink the size and weight of power-management devices.

Technology focus -- The military data storage needs of aerospace and defense end users, be they personnel or organizations, are unique “because lives may depend on the security of the information,” says Joey Sevin, business development manager at Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing (CWCEC) in Ashburn, Va.

Software standards -- Software engineers who specialize in mission-critical applications are gearing up for the release of an update to DO-178B safety-critical software certification standard in the form of DO-178C, which accommodates modern software engineering technologies such as formal methods and object-oriented programming.