Dowty Propellers recently opened a new facility in Brockworth, England to provide a modern operation for the company's development, manufacture and support of state-of-the-art propeller systems with all-composite blades.

Airbus announced that, as part of its plan to produce 63 A320 Family aircraft per month in 2021, the company will expand its industrial footprint in the U.S. by increasing the production rate of A320 family aircraft at its Airbus U.S. Manufacturing Facility in Mobile to seven per month by the beginning of next year. This increase, and continued recruiting for the A220 manufacturing team, will result in a further 275 jobs added at the Alabama-based facility over the next year. The company will also invest another $40 million through construction of an additional support hangar on the site, bringing its total investment to more than $1 billion in the Gulf Coast city.

Taking to the sky is what NASA does best. The agency is offering drone design improvements that can help create the next wave of advanced unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Technologies are available that cut wing weight to keep drones flying longer, components that keep UAV swarms in the air despite a broken drone, shape memory alloys that reconfigure aircraft in flight, and a compact droned that flys for 24 straight hours.

A modern airplane’s fuselage is made from multiple sheets of different composite materials that must be wheeled into warehouse-sized ovens where the layers fuse together to form a resilient, aerodynamic shell.

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.

To help define the meaning of “high-speed A/D” used in this handbook, we will be focusing primarily on A/D converters with sampling rates higher than 100 MHz. We will review sampling techniques, FPGA technology and we will present the latest Pentek high-speed A/D products and applications based on them.

Before the advent of OpenVPX, designers of embedded systems took advantage of the extreme connectivity offered by VPX (VITA 46), but were faced with a virtually unlimited number of possible implementations. Specific choices for the control and data channel assignments for each slot, the backplane connectivity, and serial fabrics were often made somewhat arbitrarily to suit the particular needs of the current system. Although following the general framework of VITA 46, each system tended to be so unique, that the boards and backplanes designed for one system were seldom usable in other systems, even from the same vendor.

SDR (Software-Defined Radio) has revolutionized electronic systems for a variety of applications including communications, data acquisition and signal processing.This handbook shows how DDCs (Digital Downconverters) and DUCs (Digital Upconverters), the fundamental building blocks of SDR, can replace legacy analog receiver and transmitter designs while offering significant benefits in performance, density and cost.

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.

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.