Blog

The VITA standards group has existed for many years now, developing the VME, VXS, XMC, VPX, and VNX standards as common physical and electrical formats to enable the development of modular systems. In military systems, the need for using open-architecture systems approaches became a priority.... read more

The US Army has developed an open standard to define and drive interoperability on airborne and ground platforms, referred to as C5ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards, otherwise known as CMOSS. CMOSS is a modular open systems architecture (MOSA) intended to converge computing and command capabilities into one system, as opposed to integrating and managing separate capability “boxes” into a platform. CMOSS is a buzzword around the US defense industry and is one of several open architecture standards with a healthy focus from both Government and industry leaders. While CMOSS was initiated by the Army, other elements around the DOD and allied nations are beginning to take notice. The concept of “open architecture” is here to stay.... read more

Customization. That word triggers fear in the hearts of design engineers, with thoughts of schedule slips and delays, increased technical risk, and the oh-so-frightening ka-ching of increased costs. But in reality, collaborating with a power supply manufacturer who can work with you to tailor key features can actually reduce cost and schedule risk for the most complex power supply requirement. Technical risk is mitigated even further when designing from a field-proven, existing product or circuit topology. Starting from the 60% or 80% solution, a power supply manufacturer's engineering team can collaborate with you to tailor to your specific and unique design needs and make it unequivocally right; the 100% solution!... read more

The armed forces see Software Defined Radios (SDR) as an optimal solution to combat the ever-changing communications technologies surrounding traditional manpack radios that are used in today’s ground vehicles. SDRs enables the radio chassis to run multiple wavelengths or can accept an upgrade capability by simply changing out payload cards. By using a single chassis as the base platform, there have been significant size, weight, and power (SWaP) improvements for the vehicle and platform integrations. This enables the combination of shared resources and, by reducing the amount of man-pack radios, decreases the tax on the vehicle’s electrical system.... read more

Every electrical system created for the battlefield poses its own unique set of challenges that require difficult design decisions. We know that design engineers all too well understand about the trade-offs between requirements of the system and those of its components. The same is true for industry standards that apply at the system level versus those that apply to its components. When faced with what to do when overlapping standards don't agree, sometimes the answer is -- do more.... read more