For the defense industry, NAND Flash, with its lack of moving parts, has made it the common storage medium for a variety of field applications. With its small size, low power usage, high performance and robustness in extreme environments, choosing solid state storage has been a clear choice from the beginning.

Many of the computer simulation tools used today got their start in the Aerospace industry but their use has always been coupled with significant physical testing. The introduction of composite aircraft structures, however, is creating a need for more reliance on simulation tools and methods. Aircraft designers find many benefits in composites, but they also are wary of some of the potential difficulties that composites can present—issues that the latest simulation software is designed to manage.

Telecommunications design continues its evolution toward higher bandwidth and performance, fueled by growth in Giga-bit Ethernet, wireless network systems and competitive business models incorporating multi-play network services. Similar data-rich applications characterize military design, with a broad spectrum of image-intensive applications powering modern warfare. With fewer troops on the ground, more use of reconnaissance gathered via autonomous vehicles, and real-time feeds informing command and operations, system developers must deliver more network-centric solutions and applications that offer ideal support to today's warfighter.

Liquid resin infusion (LRI) is a proven manufacturing technology for both small- and large-scale structures for which, in most cases, experience and limited prototype experimentation is sufficient to get a satisfactory design. However, large-scale aerospace and other vehicle structures require reproducible, high-quality, defect-free parts with excellent mechanical performance. These requirements necessitate precise control and knowledge of the preforming (draping and manufacture of the composite fabric preforms), their assembly, and the resin infusion.

The business jet market has a resilience all its own. While defense spending has sharply declined, the commercial sector is over-flowing with multi-thousand order backlogs. But if business jet orders can tail off dramatically and then bounce back so quickly, what accounts for this collective long-term immunity to volatile market demands?

To support warfighters in the field, engineers and technicians install, maintain, troubleshoot, and repair a wide range of mission-critical radar and communication systems. These tasks typically require measurements of cables, antennas, components, signals, and more. Often, this work must be done in non-ideal conditions such as rain or shine, hot or cold, aboard a ship, in an aircraft, or in a vehicle.

The maturity of RF photonic components has reached the point where fiber optic links are being system-tested to replace traditional copper coax links on avionic platforms. Many demonstrations of RF photonic links have been made with traditional and non-traditional modulation formats to improve the RF performance of the link. While the advantages of RF photonic links in regard to size and weight are important, the large instantaneous bandwidth of the fiber optic links is a key driver for the use of this technology in the airframe.