The US Army Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC), the Army’s focal point for aviation and missile platform research, has replaced its aging projectors with six Matrix StIM™ projectors from Christie, a company that specializes in simulation and visualization displays. The LED-illumination display tools will be used in AMRDEC's Battlefield Highly Immersive Virtual Environment Laboratory, or BHIVE Lab, which simulates various cockpit and flight scenarios.

Kollmorgen has released an in-line variant of its lightweight, low voltage Power Generation System, which will be used by the United States Army to deliver onboard vehicle power (OBVP) generation to the military’s Fuel-Efficient Ground Vehicle Demonstrator (FED). The Kollmorgen system enables the FED Alpha vehicle to provide 30 kW of power at 28 VDC, over a wide engine operating band.

Radar cross section (RCS) is the measure of an object's ability to reflect radar signals in the direction of the radar receiver, i.e. it is the measure of the ratio of backscatter per steradian (unit solid angle) in the direction of the target radar to the power density intercepted by the target. RCS measurements help ensure the design of commercial and military aircraft and radar systems, as well as to maintain their performance once they are deployed.

Change is a concept that is well known in the computer industry. Designers and manufacturers alike have embraced this trend in an ongoing race to increase computing power while reducing size, weight, and power and cost (SWaPaC). With the latest round of ultra-low power processors from Intel, VIA, AMD and DMP, stackable computer systems need to adapt as well, especially with respect to I/O, while striking a balance between new and legacy technology.

The new OpenVPX™ (VITA 65) standard helps military system designers build compatible embedded systems by defining “profiles” to which vendors can adhere when designing boards, and system integrators can use to locate available COTS solutions. The market is seeing a proliferation of 6U VPX boards, which have numerous interconnect pins and are able to support many more simultaneous external connections with a single profile. In comparison, 3U VPX boards have fewer interconnect pins available, resulting in a far wider fragmentation of profile support, since vendors can support fewer external connections with a single 3U card profile. That makes it all the more important for designers of small form factor VPX systems to understand how to effectively use OpenVPX profiles.

By offering the ability to update application functionality, provide a reconfigurable solution and enable easy design customization, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology has long been known as a cost-effective design resource. Similarly, x86 processor architectures share many of the same extended ecosystem, installed base, and multi-functionality benefits as FPGAs.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has extended its contract with Thermacore to develop and commercialize active heat sinks that can be used with Micro-technologies for Air-Cooled Exchangers (MACE). The MACE program harnesses active micro-devices that greatly improve heat sink thermal performance and cool military electronic systems used for telecommunications, active sensing and imaging, radar, and other functions. Thermacore is partnering with the University of Minnesota, Lockheed Martin Company, and the Bergquist Torrington Company to develop the technology.