Seastema SpA, a company owned by Fincantieri (Genova, Italy), designs, develops, and supplies integrated automation systems for different areas of the marine industry. The company established an Innovation Division in Rome to verify the feasibility of an unconventional radar system by means of a demonstrator built as much as possible with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices.

Marvin Test Solutions, Inc.
Irvine, CA
888-837-8297
www.MarvinTest.com

Marvin Test Solutions, Inc., a company that specializes in globally-deployed test solutions for military, aerospace, and manufacturing organizations, announced that it has received new contracts for its MTS-3060 SmartCan™ from multiple international customers to support armament systems testing on different platforms. When deployed, the Smart-Can's international customer list will grow to 12 countries using 8 different aircraft of various types and blocks. The new SmartCan contracts cover F/A-18, Hawk, F-16, and F-15, as well as the first Army test application.

Pulsed signals are widespread in radar and other electronic warfare (EW) applications, and they must be accurately measured for manufacturing, design of countermeasures, and threat assessment; however, pulse measurements are an especially challenging area for signal analysis due to these factors:

Additive manufacturing was invented more than 30 years ago and, from small beginnings in prototyping, has developed and grown into a $6 billion industry. While additive manufacturing for aerospace and defense has seen slower adoption than some other industries, the velocity is now visibly increasing. This has been enabled by the ongoing development of additive technologies that apply more increasingly to aerospace and defense -namely better plastics materials, faster 3D printing technologies, focused development of metals materials, and resulting technologies and processes that are increasingly easier to get qualified.

Aerospace industry component manufacturing is in a large growth cycle. Advancements to materials and engine efficiency have created clear benefits for replacing a surplus of older aircraft equipment. The advancements cover both engine and structural components. The demand is so significant that machine tool makers are challenged to supply equipment fast enough.

To the passing optical signals, fiberoptic rotary joints (FORJs) are nothing more than fiber connectors, which provide connection between one or multiple fibers. Their unrestricted ability to rotate, however, gives them a critical role in many sensing, mobile, and robotic fiber systems such as ROVs (remotely operated vehicles), aerostat radars, submarines, satellite antennae, OCT (optical coherence tomography), mining vehicles, cranes, wind turbines, robotic vehicles, broadcasting (mobile cameras), etc. This article discusses some of the applications where optical rotary joints are indispensable.

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DO-254, the design assurance guideline for airborne electronic hardware, is considered by many to be a simple cut/paste of DO-178, its avionics software sibling. Surely, as with wine and beer, both are fermented liquids which become increasingly expensive with increased complexity. While similarities abound, so do their many differences. And truly, DO-254 is the benefactor, or bane, of avionics projects the world over. But is DO-254 really unduly expensive? Does it add value? Will it improve safety and reliability? Does it have benefits? What are the true costs versus benefits? These important questions are answered herein.

Well into its third decade of widespread deployment, VME adopted the new VXS gigabit serial interface, clearly representing the most significant leap in backplane data transfer rates throughout its entire history. Because VXS delivered such a dramatic improvement in embedded system performance, the use of gigabit serial technology was extended to create VPX. The OpenVPX initiative followed shortly thereafter, as risk-averse government agencies mandated the need for industry-wide standards. The hallmark of any successful standard is that it continues to evolve with technology, and none offers a better example than VME’s evolution to VXS and VPX.

In today’s world of high-speed A/D converters operating in the gigahertz range, real-time signal recording has become a challenging task that requires specialized hardware and intelligent application software. When designing a real-time recorder capable of streaming sustained data to disk at rates of up to 5 GB/sec and higher, the system developer has to consider the limitations presented by the recorder’s operating and file systems, the limitations of disk drive technology, the hardware interfaces, and the RAID controller technology.

FPGAs have become an increasingly important resource for software radio systems. Programmable logic technology now offers significant advantages for implementing software radio functions such as DDCs (Digital Downconverters). Over the past few years, the functions associated with DDCs have seen a shift from being delivered in ASICs (Application-Specific ICs) to operating as IP (Intellectual Property) in FPGAs.