April 2004

Departments Publisher's Notebook COTS—The Good, the Bad and the Ugly COTS Products Editorial COTS, At the Heart of Jointness

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Features

Hardware Assets
Data Acquisition Systems & Sub-Systems

Data Acq Boards Blend ADCs, FPGAs and Speedy I/O
Jeff Child

Throughput is the name of the game in high-performance data acquisition. To keep data flowing, board vendors are expanding their reliance of FPGAs.

COTS Approach Shrinks EW Receivers
S. Sudha Rani, Scientist, KR. Sundaram, Scientist, Defence Electronics Research Laboratory

Heavy, custom-built designs have been the norm for electronic warfare gear. Shifting to commercial components shrinks the size, cost and power consumption of these critical systems.

Geospatial Asset Management Revamps for New Era
Dr. Joan Lurie, Senior Business Development Consultant, ADAM Systems Group

The wealth of geospatial imagery and data available continues to ramp. Fast, efficient management systems are required to meet diverse application needs.

Subtractive Dither Approach Streamlines Data Acquisition Designs
Jeff Polan, President, Advanced Systems Concepts

A subtractive dither approach can shrink signal dependencies and extend the accuracy of any digitizer, all without impacting storage bandwidth.

Test and Screening
Shock & Vibration: Mitigation, Products and Testing

Vibration Test Techniques Shake the Status Quo
Jeff Child

With traditional Mil-Spec qualifications growing out-of-date, newer, more comprehensive methods of testing vibration are gaining awareness and acceptance.

Case Study: ATR Design Tackles Thermal Hurdles
Domenic Trapassi, Director of Engineering, CG Mupac

Tasked to improve upon the power dissipation capabilities of a standard ATR chassis, a design team puts thermal modeling to good use.

Technology Focus
Switched Serial Fabrics

Advanced System Architectures Drive Choice of Switch Fabric Solution
Kevin Deierling, Mellanox

For truly distributed and flexible architectures that demand high performance, the interconnect between computing nodes that offers transport level connection and low CPU overhead is InfiniBand.

Increasing Demands on Display Wall Controllers Leads to Fabric-Based Architecture
Eric Wogsberg, President and Co-Founder, Jupiter Systems

Migrating from PCI to StarFabric increased bus speeds from 1 Gbit/s to over 40 Gbits/s, allowing up to 100 wall projectors.

The Role of Serial Switched Fabrics in Sensor-to-Processor Applications
Paul Davis, Stream Computing Product Manager, Systran Corporation

The temptation is to convert to serial switched fabrics; however, Serial FPDP is a longer-haul serial version of the tried-and-true parallel FPDP that still works best in Sensor-to-Processor designs.

From Machine Vision to Reconnaissance: Image Fusion Brings Targets into View
Ian Double, BAE SYSTEMS Avionics

Image fusion is computationally and data intensive, requiring FPGAs, RISC CPUs and high-speed serial fabrics such as VITA 41 VXS to move data between modules.