This magazine department highlights a narrowly focused technology area and takes an in-depth look at associated products and developments. This will include tried-and-true technologies like boards and displays, along with topics such as data acquisition and conduction-cooled graphics modules.
Most Recent

Small Form Factor Boards
Small Form Factor Boards Make Big Impact
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
August 2010
Small form factor boards—while always of keen interest to the military market—are becoming ever more critical for defense applications. Such applications include small UAVs, robotics,Read More...
Past Articles

Small Form Factor Boards
Small Form Factor Boards Roundup
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
August 2010
COM Express Module Targets Graphics-Intensive Apps COM Express is rapidly becoming the non-backplane standard of choice for new military system designs. A new Computer-on-ModuleRead More...

OpenVPX Boards
OpenVPX: Cards Dealt, Ready to Play
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
July 2010
Hailed as the next-generation fabric-based slot card standard, VPX has had a few rocky years getting started. But over the last year and a half, the goal of bringing together advancedRead More...

OpenVPX Boards
OpenVPX Boards Roundup
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
July 2010
FPGA and TigerSHARC Share 3U VPX Board FPGAs and DSPs have different strengths when it comes to the signal processing muscle they provide. BittWare has brought together the bestRead More...

PC/104 and PC/104-Family Boards
PC/104 Camp Ropes in Multiple Interconnect Schemes
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
June 2010
PC/104 and all of its follow-on variants continue to hold an established position in military embedded systems. Now, as PCI Express and USB make their way into the PC/104 universe,Read More...

PC/104 and PC/104-Family Boards
PC/104 and PC/104-Family Boards Roundup
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
June 2010
Rugged EPIC SBC Features SUMIT Expansion The SUMIT interconnect scheme provides an innovative way to aggregate a variety of I/O types onto a compact connector. Marrying that ideaRead More...

FPGA Processing Boards
FPGA Boards Rev Up for Signal Processing Duties
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
May 2010
Military applications like sonar, radar, SIGINT and software radio—all of which rely on heavy amounts of waveform processing—continue to leverage advances in FPGA technology. FasterRead More...

FPGA Processing Boards
FPGA Processing Boards Roundup
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
May 2010
Virtex-5 FPGA PMC Aims at I/O Processing At one time FPGAs served merely as glue logic interfaces. Now they function as complete processing engines. Acromag’s PMC-VFX modulesRead More...

Multicore Boards
Multicore Processing Becomes the New Mainstream
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
April 2010
Gone are the days when processor architectures sporting multiple CPU cores on the same device were exotic and unique. They’ve now moved solidly into the mainstream desktop and severRead More...

Multicore Boards
Multicore Boards Roundup
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
April 2010
3U cPCI Couples Core 2 Duo Processor, SATA SSD CompactPCI, particularly in its 3U flavor, has carved out a large chunk of adoption in the military realm. Aitech Defense SystemsRead More...

Ethernet Switch Boards
Ethernet Switch Boards Roundup
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
March 2010
Rugged 10 Gbit Ethernet XMC Sports Dual Front-Panel Interfaces The military has completely embraced Ethernet both as a network technology and as a fabric interconnect scheme.Read More...

Ethernet Switch Boards
Switch Ethernet Stakes Claim as Embedded Interconnect
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
March 2010
Ethernet switch boards have won a place as a critical building block for a variety of military programs. Once used only as a pure networking solution for command and control systemsRead More...

Conduction-Cooled CompactPCI Boards
Conduction-Cooled cPCI Lands a Secure Place in Military Systems
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
February 2010
Now with over eighteen years of experience under its belt, CompactPCI can claim to offer all the factors that attract military decision makers. An expanding set of conduction-cooledRead More...

Conduction-Cooled CompactPCI Boards
Conduction-Cooled cPCI Board Roundup
February 2010
6U cPCI Blade Does Extended Temps and Conduction Cooling The Core2 Duo processor quickly became the most widely used multicore processor, and the military embedded space was quickRead More...

Serial FPDP Boards
Serial FPDP Board Roundup
January 2010
VME Card Provides 24 Serial FPDP Channels Using FPGAs in conjunction with the Serial FPDP (sFPDP) interconnect makes for a powerful combination. Such a solution has enormousRead More...

Serial FPDP Boards
FPDP Boards Maintain Niche in High-Bandwidth Apps
Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief
January 2010
Many kinds of high-performance embedded computing systems in the military market have an appetite for high-speed data from sensors. Often such input is presented as one or moreRead More...

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