Military/Aerospace Electronics

Thales Alenia Space has announced the acquisition of the “space activities” of Systems Engineering & Assessment (SEA) Limited, which is part of Cohort plc. Thales Alenia Space UK expects the deal will boost growth in systems engineering and research and technology. “Our decision to come to the UK, motivated by the UK Government’s work has been supported by concrete actions ...

NASA has successfully beamed a high-definition video 260 miles from the International Space Station to Earth using a new laser communications instrument. The US space agency says the transmission of the “Hello, World!” video was the first 175-megabit communication for the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS). It was a technology demonstration, says NASA, to test methods for communication with ...

Smart fusing of data from multiple image sensors can improve military driving, said a European consortium. Several image sensor types are used in military applications: daylight sensors (mostly CCD), image intensifier tubes for low light, and thermal (short, medium and long wavelength). Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and some sort of mixing can be useful. “The typical solution ...

Providing Mobile (MSS), Fixed (FSS) and Broadcast Satellite Services (BSS)

The need to be green is now an established way of thinking ion the consumer market. It has also been heavily adopted in eth aerospace sector, and now military systems are following the call. “Sustainability initiatives, green energy and environmental regulation are part of everyday life both in a domestic setting and in the wider world,” says Steve Munns, mil-aero ...

Kontron VX3327’s is a 3U VPX graphics card with AMD Embedded Radeon E6760 GPU which is designed to military standards. Its 480 computing cores are capable of parallel data processing performance of up to 576GFlops. The 35W board uses conduction cooling to deal with a temperature range of -40°C to +85°C. The OpenVPX-compliant 3U VPX graphics card has been designed ...

US-based e2v aerospace and defense is offering a qualified family of re-engineered 8-bit 80C51 microcontrollers. Manufactured on a mainstream CMOS process, and compliant to Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Standard Microcircuit Drawings, the microcontrollers are designed as drop-in replacements for a variety of 80C51 architecture devices from original suppliers such as AMD, Atmel, Intel, NXP and Philips, and are widely used in military and aerospace applications. ...

Cree has released a 500W gallium nitride HEMTs for 1.2-1.4GHz L-Band radar amplifier systems. Called CGHV14500, it also has a 250W partner, the CGHV14250. According to the firm, they have “the highest known L-Band efficiency performance at 85°C”. Applications are foreseen between UHF and 1.8GHz in: tactical air navigation systems (TACAN), identification: friend or foe (IFF) systems, and military telemetry. ...

Linear Technology has squeezed a 14V, 4A step-down DC-DC controller  design to a PCB area of just 1 square cm, including a few passive components. On a doubled-sided board the design can be as small as 0.5cm square, said the company. The LTM4624 includes the DC/DC controller, power switches, inductor and compensation in a single package. According to the supplier, ...

UK-based hi-rel semiconductor maker e2v has announced the availability of its P2041 and P3041 processors, extended-reliability versions of Freescale’s quad core QorIQ processors. Aerospace and defence designs have widely adopted the multicore processors common to commercial systems, in order to optimise power and system size. The P2041 quad-core processor is intended as an entry-level device with embedded data path acceleration ...