February 2015

The McHale Report, by mil-embedded.com Editorial Director John McHale covers technology and procurement trends in the defense electronics community.


 


Executive Outlook

An insatiable need for ISR 
New aircraft production down, avionics upgrade funding steady

In this Q&A with Troy Brunk, Vice President and General Manager of Airborne Solutions for Rockwell Collins Government Systems, he discusses his outlook for military avionics technology, what pilots want avionics technology to do for them, and the situational awareness benefits of synthetic vision.

 

Immediately start application development!

The Model 8267 is a pre-configured 3U VPX system for the expansive family of Pentek Flexor® FMC, Cobalt® Virtex-6 and Onyx® Virtex-7 FPGA 3U VPX software radio and data acquisition I/O boards.

 

Top Stories

Lockheed Martin 
DARPA to leverage open architectures, enabling UAS to fly as collaborative units

DARPA announced that it's Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment (CODE) program is holding discussions to enable development of software that will enable unmanned aircraft to work together with minimal supervision.

 
Lockheed Martin 
British army SCOUT SV program to use Ethernet switches, video servers, data servers, from GE Intelligent Platforms  

General Dynamics UK awarded GE Intelligent Platforms with $100 million in orders for open architecture, embedded computing subsystems for use onboard the British army’s SCOUT Specialist Vehicle (SV) platforms.

 
 
Remote GPS receiver from Rockwell Collins works with commercial smartphones and military mobile devices  

Engineers at Rockwell Collins have designed a GPS receiver that can plug and play with commercial and military mobile devices.

 
 
Updates made to VxWorks RTOS by Wind River   

Officials at Wind River released updates to it's VxWorks 653, which has support for multi-core silicon and partitioning for DO-178 certification. 

 

Blogs & Columns

AIA annual forecast: defense spending still dangerously low 
Five ways open source middleware can impact unmanned systems

Historically, unmanned ISR platforms, but this process has created limitations on interoperability and increased costs, leading the DoD to look at other, more viable options, including commercially supported open source middleware.

 
AIA annual forecast: defense spending still dangerously low 
Defining fifth generation warfare

Discussing fifth generation warfare (5GW) makes me think of this quote from the Bible: "I beheld, and lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled."--Jeremiah 4:25. This defines 5GW, non-contact warfare in the present context.

 
AIA annual forecast: defense spending still dangerously low 
Link aggregation: A cool tip for better bandwidth & redundancy on Ethernet switches  

Most of us think that adding bandwidth availability or link redundancy would include costly equipment investment or link upgrades, but with link aggregation, that’s just not the case.

 
AIA annual forecast: defense spending still dangerously low 
Can Agile environments accelerate embedded software verification & certification?  

Although Agile development is being adopted by most software development organizations, most embedded developers resist Agile methodologies.

 
AIA annual forecast: defense spending still dangerously low 
Mitigating counterfeit ICs, tin whiskers, IC reliability highlight CMSE program   

Counterfeit mitigation, reliability of COTS ICs, supply chain challenges, are some of the topics in the lineup for the Components for Military & Space Electronics (CMSE conference.

 

 
Sequestration's impact on the defense electronics market

This month we discuss the effect of sequestration has had on the defense electronics community.

 


 

Markets & Business Deals

 
UAS sensor engineering firm, Sensintel bought by Raytheon  

Raytheon purchased UAS solution provider Sensintel, Inc., which will become part of Raytheon Company's Missile Systems business.

 
 
NTDS developer Sabtech no called IXI Technology   

Michael Carter CEO and owner of Navy Tactical Data System (NTDS) designer Sabtech, changed the company's name to IXI Technology

 
 
Military simulation and training market to show moderate growth over next decade   

Analysts at ASD Reports say the global military simulation market should show moderate to strong growth through 2024.

 
 


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