All electronic devices generate heat due to their unavoidable internal losses and inefficiencies. The higher the efficiency rating of the device, the less internal heat is generated within it. If we could achieve 100% efficiency, and technology is getting ever closer to that elusive goal, no heat would be generated within the device and, therefore, no cooling would be required. Until then, the generated heat must be dissipated to maximize the end product's reliability and prevent its premature failure.

The PMC, or PCI Mezzanine Card, follows the IEEE P1386.1 standard for printed circuit boards. PMCs combine the electrical characteristics of the PCI bus with the mechanical dimensions of the Common Mezzanine Card, or CMC, format. Within the PMC format single PMC boards measure 74mm × 149mm. While the standard also defines a double-sized card, this format is rare. For PMC cards, as defined by the standard, connector configurations can be:

What makes the iPhone so great? Touch screen technology. Touch screens are changing the way we interact with technology and with iPhone, Apple has opened the floodgates of innovation for the function and design of handheld devices.

The colonel has a problem. He has eight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying over the outskirts of Baghdad, looking for potential insurgent activity. Are those people he sees moving through the streets insurgents or are they a US infantry patrol? If he alters the flight path of one UAV to loiter over the suspicious activity, how should he deploy the other seven UAVs to pick up the first's original mission? How does he keep track of the positions of the eight UAVs, what they are seeing, and the locations of nearby US troops, all in real-time?

The database concepts, tools, and runtime software described in this article provide a methodology for creating advanced avionics human-machine interfaces (HMIs), such as those found in modern flat-panel display systems. The key innovation described is the ability to treat the avionics displays as databases rather than as compiled and linked software. This new technology facilitates the goals of open architecture for avionics, a key avionics industry trend.

In the never-ending quest to produce high-quality software, traditional dynamic testing plays a fundamental role. The weakness of dynamic testing is that it is only as good as the test cases. To be effective, a great deal of effort must go into writing or generating good test cases, and doing so can be very expensive.

Systems engineers face a number of challenges when configuring and programming a complex, heterogeneous multiprocessor system of the type often used in digital signal processing applications. These include: