2025 innovation awards announced for enabling technologies in aerospace and defense applications

NASHUA, N.H. – Military & Aerospace Electronics is announcing the 2025 Technology Innovators Awards to recognize companies offering substantial military, aerospace, and avionics design solutions.

Awards for innovation in aerospace and defense enabling technologies are in three tiers -- ranging from platinum, the highest, to the gold awards, and finally to the silver awards -- and are based on the recommendations of an independent panel of industry judges.

Innovators awards span a range of enabling technologies for aerospace and defense applications ranging from avionics, communications and networking, embedded computing, sensors, power electronics, connectors, software, RF and microwave, chassis and enclosures, and more.

Platinum honorees

The IQSat from Aitech Systems in Chatsworth, Calif., is an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled picosatellite (PicoSat) constellation system for detecting and providing insight on patterns and anomalies for applications like military and defense, public safety, agriculture, climate, and biology. It brings AI capabilities in a low-cost commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system for low Earth orbit (LEO) missions by powering rapid actionable data and insights. IQSat’s small size provides low probability of intercept and low probability of detection, while delivering critical information to improve awareness of warfighters across sea, land, and air. It provides mission flexibility for quick and cost-effective constellation design to reduce delivery time and cost of custom sensing satellites and constellation configurations.

The EM-6841 antenna from EM Antennas in Johnstown, N.Y., is rugged and compact for military communications. The passive omnidirectional antenna covers frequencies from 20 MHz to 43.5 GHz, and can replace several legacy antennas with one unit to reduce size, weight, and complexity, while improving reliability and connectivity. Designed and manufactured in the USA, the EM-6841 is MIL-STD-810H certified for harsh conditions, enabling mission-critical operation across land, air, sea, and space. It weighs less than two pounds and is 8.75 inches tall. It is for infantry warfighters, drones, vehicles, and command posts. The EM-6841 improves system integration, lowers power needs, and simplifies tactical communications infrastructure, and delivers high gain, low voltage standing wave ratio, and consistent performance across HF to Ka bands.

Sabertooth AI from VersaLogic Corp. in Tualatin, Ore., is a compact rugged embedded computer defense, aerospace, medical, smart security, and energy applications, and supports AI and 3D rendering workloads in harsh environments. The Sabertooth AI system is powered by the hex-core Intel Xeon-E CPU and the NVIDIA RTX 2000 ADA GPU for high-performance AI inferencing, and features TPM 2.0 security, 32 gigabytes error-correcting memory, high-speed solid-state NVMe data storage, and computing power in a 90-by-96-by-63-millimeter package. It supports NVIDIA CUDA programming and Lovelace Architecture. It is designed and tested to operate in temperatures from -40 to 85 degrees Celsius, and meets MIL-STD-202H for shock and vibration.

The AxIO16 radiation-hardened I/O expander from Apogee Semiconductor in Plano, Texas, is a 16-bit radiation-hardened I/O expander that extends a processor’s digital interface over an I2C or SPI bus. It provides 16 configurable I/O pins that support push-pull or open-drain modes and can monitor or drive digital signals such as power enables, fault flags, or sensor states. Each I/O pin supports cold sparing to maintain high impedance when unpowered, which enables safe integration into redundant or power-cycled systems. The device includes two independent voltages -- one for the host interface (VCCI) and one for the I/O ports (VCCP) -- for built-in level shifting between 1.4 and 5.5 volts without external components. Radiation tolerance comes from triple modular redundancy and DICE latches to resist the effects of single event effects. The AxIO16 includes an interrupt output for wake-on-change signaling, and supports dynamic voltage scaling, programmable power sequencing, and simple DAC/ADC functions using resistor networks.

Optical I/O module

The V60653U VPX Versal Premium ASoC FPGA optical I/O module with XMC site from New Wave Design in Eden Prairie, Minn., is a heterogeneous embedded computing 3U VPX module featuring the AMD Versal Premium Adaptive System-on-Chip (ASoC), rugged optical and electrical high-speed I/O, XMC site, and SOSA-aligned profile options. The V6065 provides options for Versal Premium VP1502 or VP1702 part selection. The V6065 provides three 100G optical interfaces (300G aggregate), large FPGA fabric, ARM processor cores, and XMC site. It is for aerospace and defense applications like radar processing, signals intelligence, electronic warfare, video, storage, medical imaging, and embedded communications systems.

The Tactical Edge Network Targeting in a Contested Long-Range Environment (TENTaCLE) from Fuse Integration Inc. in San Diego can enable the U.S. military and Joint forces to exchange intelligence, surveillance, and communications data in contested environments. Its integrated IP and tactical data link (TDL) architecture is open, agile, and adaptable to changing global requirements. TENTaCLE's cipher-text core supports an open enterprise architecture that integrates diverse links, networks, processors, and sensors. It includes a monitoring and management layer for control and decision making, and ensures secure network connections over several simultaneous links and integrates systems with classified IP networks via SATCOM and other tactical links. It provides global reach-back with forward-deployed options for directional links, mesh network links, and TDLs with IP network gateway.

The INTEGRITY-178 tuMP Secure Virtualization real-time operating system (RTOS) software from Green Hills Software in Santa Barbara, Calif., can run applications on a guest operating system while maintaining a high level of security. Compared to traditional hypervisors that run entirely in privileged kernel mode, secure virtualization for INTEGRITY-178 tuMP takes a hybrid approach that separates the isolation and virtualization functions of a hypervisor. Isolation is provided by the INTEGRITY-178 tuMP hardened separation microkernel, which meets the security objectives in the NSA-defined Separation Kernel Protection Profile as well as Common Criteria EAL6+. Virtualization, including the hardware simulation, runs in user mode on top of the INTEGRITY-178 tuMP RTOS. Each virtualization layer instance runs inside of an isolated partition with a virtual machine (VM) running on top of it. Those VMs use VirtIO standard interfaces to access the host file system and other devices for enhanced portability.

RF artificial intelligence

The Radio Frequency Artificial Intelligence (RFAI) from DroneShield in Warrenton, Va., capitalizes on DEEP LEARNING to classify RF signals in real-time on software-defined radio (SDR) hardware. By learning its own representation of the hidden features in the SoI dataset (invisible to a human), RFAI outperforms hand-engineered algorithms, especially in challenging scenarios like high-RF-interference environments. The strength of RFAI lies in its SoI classification accuracy and resilience against the RF interference inevitably present in the target RF bands or frequency spectrum of interest. Instead of trying to avoid RF interference, the system learns to detect and filter it, leading to superior performance. Designed to be system-agnostic, another innovation was making the model lightweight enough to deploy on low-size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) hardware, such as battery-powered handheld devices. Finally, RFAI delivers a unique capability to detect and classify even never-before-seen drones.

The VPX3-536 from tyhe Curtiss-Wright Corp. Defense Solutions division in Ashburn, Va., is a SOSA-aligned 3U VPX FPGA plug-in card designed for high-performance sensor processing applications like radar, electronic warfare (EW), and SIGINT digital signal processing. It supports 100 Gigabit Ethernet and PCI Express Gen 4 interfaces. Its AI-enabled compute architecture with AMD Versal Premium VP2502 Adaptive SoC (ACAP), integrating a large 3.7M logic cell FPGA, two dual-core Arm processors, and DSP engines (7,392 slice). 472 adaptive intelligence engines delivering 157 teraoperations per second to accelerate AI, machine learning, and 5G signal processing workloads. Dual 400G high-speed crypto engines support line-rate MACSec, IPSec, and bulk encryption, while as many as 28 fiber optic backplane links use high-density VITA 66.5 interfaces for speeds to 28 gigabits per second per lane, enabling secure and simultaneous ingestion, processing, and egress as fast as 784 gigabits per second of optical sensor or Ethernet data. It can operate as one-slot system on a board running PetaLinux, or as a co-processing resource alongside other Fabric100.

The Cape cellular network from Cape in Arlington, Va., provides device and network solutions to government, consumers, and enterprises to ensure that mobile communications are private, secure, and resilient. It is for organizations that are at elevated risk of digital attacks, such as public figures, executives, and journalists. Cape operates as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), but runs its own mobile core software to control and secure sensitive subscriber data. This offers significantly greater protection than typical privacy apps or VPNs, addressing both device and network-level vulnerabilities. Cape lets users change unique identifiers on their mobile devices, helping prevent location tracking and profiling; stops advertisers and data brokers from building a profile based on application usage and browsing; and guards against signaling (SS7) network attacks, which can intercept calls, texts, and even track devices. Strong authentication and cryptology blocks unauthorized takeovers, and provides private encrypted voice mail and minimal data collection.

Electronics cooling

The VITA 48.4 liquid-flow-through test and development chassis from Elma Electronic in Fremont, Calif., is a rugged, lab-deployable chassis designed to test and validate high-power 6U OpenVPX payloads that require liquid-flow-through (LFT) cooling. Built for engineers developing SOSA-aligned systems, this 6-slot system enables full-speed board bring-up in a benchtop environment. The system supports an external CDU (Coolant Distribution Unit) for fluid circulation, giving customers the flexibility to pair it with high-performance cooling infrastructure from preferred vendors.

The 100 V JANS radiation hardened gallium nitride (GaN) transistor from Infineon IR HiRel in El Segundo, Calif., is an internally manufactured radiation hardened GaN device to earn certification of reliability from the U.SD. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), meeting the Joint Army Navy Space (JANS) Specification MIL-PRF-19500/794. The 100 V, 52 A GaN transistor offers high power density in a small and lightweight package with radiation performance. Its ultra-low RDS(ON) and low total gate charge with zero reverse recovery charge make it an optimal choice for high-frequency power management circuits. Additionally, the device has a total ionizing dose (TID) rating of 500 kilorads and single event effect (SEE) hardening to LET (GaN)1=70 MeV.cm2/mg (Au ion), ensuring its reliability in demanding environments. The GaN transistor is packaged in IR HiRel's new PowIR-SMD, a hermetically sealed ceramic surface mount package with thermal management. The GaN transistor is manufactured at Infineon's own foundry, ensuring the utmost in quality and guaranteeing the continuity of the supply chain.

The 3 Slot VNX+ Test and Development Chassis from Elma Electronic in Fremont, Calif., is a compact SOSA-aligned VNX+ development system for rapid board bring-up, validation, and test of VITA-90 plug-in cards (PICs). Tailored for early-stage VNX+ developers and system integrators, this 2+1 slot chassis provides a streamlined solution to accelerate time-to-market for mission-critical small form factor (SFF) systems. Supporting 400-pin and 320-pin payload slots with complete user I/O breakout and mezzanine-mapped expansion, the chassis simplifies system testing with features like a maintenance port aggregator, airflow-optimized card cage, and flexible power configurations (AC or 28VDC). Whether with or without wedgelocks or metal enclosures, this development system accommodates the real-world needs of VNX+ card engineering teams. It’s a vital enabler for cultivating a broader ecosystem of deployable VNX+ solutions across aerospace and defense programs.

Gold honorees

Milpower Source in Belmont, N.H., Miltech 918TSN; Fractal Antenna Systems Inc., ARM--Acoustic Resonance Mitigation; Milpower Source; Miltech 9020; Parallel Works ; ACTIVATE High Security Platform; OSL Technology FACE AI-powered sensor fusion and decision-support system; Inventive Resources Inc.; Enclosure Protector Attachment; D-Fend Solutions, EnforceAir2; Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions, Motion Control Stabilization System; PIC Wire & Cable, Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) Cable; General Micro Systems, Triple-Domain Cross Domain System; Real-Time Innovations (RTI), RTI Connext.

Silver honorees

Durabook Americas Inc. Durabook S14I rugged laptop; Neousys Technology; Rugged IP66 Edge AI Computer Powered by NVIDIA Jetson NRU-230V-AWP; Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions, PacStar Modular Radio Center (MRC); LCR Embedded Systems, Dual System SAVE Compliant Innovation; AirBorn, a Molex Company, verSI high density interconnect system; Getac Technology Corp. Getac B360 Pro rugged laptop; Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions Fortress HUMS; Elma Electronic, AI Enabled Test and Development Chassis; General Micro Systems, X9 AI Virtual Router with Cisco NFV; and General Micro Systems, X9 Venom 3U OpenVPX Mission Computer.