Within the last two years the concept of “Stand-Alone Rugged Boxes” has become a fixture in this market. The trend has now broadened out to include a larger contingent of smaller form factor board vendors. The term standalone rugged boxes applies to complete system boxes—which often support standard form factor boards inside them. These systems provide a complete, tested and enclosed computing solution that eliminates complex integration chores for military customers. This idea has been gathering momentum in the past couple years whereby traditional embedded board vendors are adding stand-alone rugged box-level systems to their military market offerings.
Here we are another November. When you read this column
the election will be over and at least we will know whom to beat over the head to get us out of all the confusion we’re in. I haven’t felt this lack of leadership feeling since the late ’70s. The next President better have a lot of Gen. George Patton in his leadership style—the time for politics is over. It’s like we’ve hunkered down and only focused on the best defensive posture. The new President needs to get a strong decisive team in place that can prioritize and execute for the good of the nation, not an election.
Systems including small UAVs, robotics, mission-specific handheld systems, intelligent munitions and many others have one thing in common: a desire for small form factor embedded computers that draw scant amounts of power. The ongoing march of Moore’s Law keeps working its magic such that, today, the definition of “system” has been redefined to where complete computing engines now easily fit within the area of a cocktail napkin. Boards in this category include such form factors as PC/104, EPIC, mini-ITX, StackableUSB, COM Express, MicroETXexpress along with a variety of small non-standard boards.
The military market isn’t exactly keen to ride the bleeding edge when it comes to embracing new power supply and power conversion concepts. But it’s had no choice than to evolve in order to keep pace with the challenges of modern digital electronics. The newest crop of high-performance FPGAs and processors demands a lot from a power supply. They typical require low voltages, high currents, tight regulation, fast transient response and even supply voltage sequencing. Meanwhile, the typical high-performance embedded computer requires several different voltages, 5V and below. For example, each FPGA or DSP will require one voltage for the I/O circuitry and another to power the processor core.
