Communications in Space: A Deep Subject

Transmitting and receiving radio signals between spacecraft in deep space is a snap compared with getting those signals back to Earth, especially when the spacecraft is 120 billion miles away.

Designing for Compressive Sensing: Compressive Art, Camouflage, Fonts, and Quick Response Codes

Compressive sensing (CS) is a relatively new field that has caused a lot of excitement in the signal processing community. It has superseded...

Loop Thermosyphons

Two-phase cooling has been utilized in the electronics cooling industry for many decades, with possibly the most well-known adaptation being the heat pipe. Heat pipes are capillary-driven, two-phase devices that...

Content Addressable Memory (CAM) Technologies for Big Data and Intelligent Electronics Enabled By Magneto-Electric Ternary CAM

Content addressable memory (CAM) is one of the most promising hardware solutions for high-speed data searching and...

Energy-Filtered Tunnel Transistor: A New Device Concept Toward Extremely Low Energy Consumption Electronics

Altering the thermal characteristics of semiconductors can prolong battery life.

Excessive heat dissipation (or power...

DPA Countermeasures — Theory vs. Practice

The Threat

In today’s interconnected world, the information that we generate, store, transmit, and receive has become a valuable commodity. We have increasingly turned to cryptography as a tool...

A Hardware-Centric Approach to Countering Side-Channel Threats

From laptops and mobile devices to cars and airplanes, we are seeing near-daily threats to the systems and devices we use. Systems being used and deployed in the aerospace and...

Countering Cybersecurity Threats Against Unmanned Vehicle Systems

As the use of UASs and UAVs increase in the modern battlefield, the need to secure these weapon platforms is of increasing importance as any flaw could have catastrophic...

Controlling the Seas: Introducing a New Concept in Autonomous Surface/Underwater Vehicles

The boundary between the sea and sky is an important place to be. It’s the critical connecting layer for commercial and military information exchange...

MicroTCA Computing for Mil/Aero Applications

Small Form Factor (SFF) embedded systems have been gaining popularity due to their small size, weight, and power (SWaP) advantages. The SFF architectures are typically purpose-built, providing...

Using Forensic Lasers in Modern Warfare

In the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the enemy’s guerilla tactics have muddled the distinction between terrorism and warfare. To deal with the challenges of this new type of combat, the military...

Advances and Challenges in Developing Radar Applications

Radar is used to detect and/or track target objects and their attributes, such as range, speed, and other information obtained through signals at RF and microwave frequencies. The...

Free Space Optical Communications System for Advancing Superiority on the Battlefield

Fixed and tactical information networking, especially for defense applications, has begun to require increasing data transmission capacity as the...

iSLC Flash Technology

Robots have been employed by the military to assist in missions where it would be, and has been, too dangerous to have a human being take on the task. These robots can detect and disable bombs. Some can be thrown into...

Using Polyimide In 3D Thin Film Multilayer Circuitry

Today, the cost and complexity of all platforms and systems in military and defense technologies are being challenged by the need for high functionality in smaller but less expensive...

CompactPCI Steps Into the Future

CompactPCI Serial has proven to be a beneficial technology upgrade for a number of embedded systems designers accustomed to working with the legacy CompactPCI platform. Not only does CompactPCI Serial bring...

Designing Rugged, Standards-Based Embedded Solutions

It can be argued that small form factor design trends are paradoxical. As form factor size decreases, functionality requirements increase; as processing power requirements heighten, lower...

Small Form Factor Computers Go Ultra-low Power

Agrowing number of mobile, space constrained or harsh environment applications are being designed for the military, industrial automation/HMI, digital signage and medical markets that are...

Bi-Axial Vibration Energy Harvesting

For air platforms, the installation of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems is complicated by the fact that the majority of SHM devices need to be fitted on internal aircraft structure, underneath...

Embedded Graphics Processor

Rockwell Collins (Cedar Rapids, IA), a designer of communications and avionics systems for the aerospace and defense industries, has selected the AMD Radeon™ E2400 embedded graphics processor for inclusion in...

Evaluation of Three Extremity Armor Systems

The US Marine Corps and the US Army have been engaged in efforts to evaluate improved body armor, including armor to protect the extremities. These efforts are focused on both body armor...

Low-Power Distributed Jammer Network

The Distributed Jammer Network (DJN) is composed of a large number of tiny, low-power jammers, which are distributed inside a target network and emit radio energy to disrupt its communications. Recent...

Embedded Video Requirements Drive New Mezzanine Card Format

Sophisticated graphics have hit the embedded systems world and are increasingly demanded by military, aerospace, industrial, and medical applications. The problem, of course, is...

Architecture of the Air Force Satellite Control Network

The Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) is a worldwide network of ground stations that supports a variety of users from NASA to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The...

Energy-Scalable Protocols for Battery Operated Micro Sensor Networks

Networks of microsensors can greatly improve environment monitoring for many civil and military applications. Multiple sensors provide fault tolerance and can provide...

Extensible Processing Platforms: Giving Designers the Best of Both Worlds

Creating a new field programmable gate array is no small feat. FPGA vendors spend tens-of-thousands of man-hours simply researching markets to determine the feature...