White Paper: Troubleshooting Data Corruption on NAND Flash Memory

Kerri McConnell, Vice President (Datalight, Inc.)

In the embedded world, frustrating and costly data failures can occur even with the right hardware, software and development. So, what do you do you encounter a failure in the field? Download this troubleshooting guide for tools and methods to help you diagnose data corruption on NAND flash media.

Image-processing programming: Hope for non-nerds?

Charlotte Adams (Abaco Systems)

Today's armored-vehicle and helicopter operators can detect, assess, and act upon threats with the aid of devices such as helmet-mounted displays and heads-up displays. Thanks to image processing, ground-attack vehicle commanders soon will be able to enjoy a 360-degree "window" on their environments... [read more]

White Paper: Limitless: How device manufacturers are building a new future with smart connected devices

Staff (Microsoft )

The Internet of Things (IoT) has split manufacturing businesses wide open, blurring the distinction between hardware and software and creating once in a lifetime opportunity for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). For OEMs who have experienced cost and commoditization pressures, the news could... [read more]

White Paper: Windows 10 IoT Enterprise

Cristine Valladao, EMEA IoT Lead (Microsoft)

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise is a full version of Windows 10 that powers a range of industry devices across retail, manufacturing, health, government and other industries.

White Paper: Production Floor Trends: Justifying Additive Manufacturing Through Jigs & Futures

Joe Hiemenz (Stratasys)

There is an often-overlooked additive manufacturing (AM) application with potentially huge financial returns. Savings can be so large that they can justify the purchase of an AM (or 3D printing) system in far less time than the typical three- to five-year payback period the financial officer will de... [read more]

White Paper: Replicating human reasoning with sensor-driven mobile supercomputing

Staff (Abaco Systems)

As learning algorithms break free from the confines of the computer rooms of research institutes and into the real world, the evolution of these algorithms is expected to progress rapidly, allowing classifiers to distinguish between an ambulance and a delivery truck, or a school bus and a van, for e... [read more]

White Paper: Best Use of Discards to Improve Flash Storage Performance

Thom Denholm (Datalight); Thom Denholm (Datalight)

Steep declines in performance can arise in eMMC and UFS if discards are not being used. But what do discards mean for the flash and the file system, and can you balance the performance and the cost to make them work with your use case?

White Paper: Perform Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation with MATLAB and Simulink to Test and Validate Control Algorithms

Nikhil Rai (MathWorks)

Identifying and eliminating errors when developing sophisticated control algorithms requires extensive validation and testing. Inspecting thousands of lines of code is time consuming and error prone. Hardware-in-the-loop simulation enables you to validate your control algorithm against a real-time... [read more]

White Paper: Software Defined Radio Handbook -- 10th Edition

Roger H. Hosking (Pentek, Inc.)

New! Software Defined Radio Handbook The folks at Pentek, who wrote the book on software radio, are pleased to announce their recently released and expanded Software Radio Handbook. Downloaded thousands of times, the handbook has proved to be a useful technical reference for engineers. It's yours ... [read more]

White Paper: Meeting stringent military SWaP-C requirements starts in manufacturing

Staff (Sparton NavEx)

For many years, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has had strict requirements about the size, weight and power (SWaP) of components and systems developed for military applications. A challenging budget environment led to a new acronym including "c" for cost, or SWaP-C. In 2012, the DOD presented ... [read more]

DO-332, the Liskov Substitution Principle, and local type consistency ramp up DO-178 certification

Dr. Benjamin M. Brosgol (AdaCore)

DO-332, the DO-178C standard's supplement on Object-Oriented Technology (OOT) and related techniques, analyzes the issues raised by object orientation in safety-critical software and supplies new guidance to deal with OOT's vulnerabilities. An important new objective of DO-332 is "Local Type Consist... [read more]

Using NOR and NAND flash memory in M2M applications

Dan Craig (Micron Technology)

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) devices are requiring more memory capacity, which has many evaluating NOR and NAND flash-based solutions. Designers need to consider each method’s effect on system complexity, reliability, performance, and cost.

White Paper: Putting FPGAs to Work in Software Radio Systems Seventh Edition

Rodger H. Hosking (Pentek, Inc.); Rodger H. Hosking (Pentek)

This handbook reviews the advantages of FPGAs for implementing software radio functions. Some of the advantages include design flexibility, higher precision processing, higher channel density, lower power and cost per channel. The handbook is yours free, just click on the link to download.

White Paper: High-Speed, Real-Time Recording Systems -- Second Edition

Roger H. Hosking (Pentek, Inc.)

New! High-Speed, Real-Time Recording Systems Handbook The folks at Pentek are pleased to announce their newly released High-Speed, Real-Time Recording Systems Handbook. Recently updated to its 2nd edition, this handbook has proved to be a useful technical reference for engineers involved in data ac... [read more]

White Paper: High-Speed Switched Serial Fabrics Improve System Design Sixth Edition

Rodger H. Hosking (Pentek, Inc.)

This handbook reviews the development of gigabit serial fabrics to enhance the VMEbus and the PMC mezzanine; the role of FPGAs to implement this technology; and how some of the latest products can be used in high-speed data acquisition, recording and SDR systems. The handbook is yours free, cli... [read more]

Modernizing a serial processing code to obtain optimal performance on an OpenVPX digital signal processing module

Beau Paisley (Arm); Tammy Carter ( Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions)

Serial algorithms can be evolved to a scalable, multithreaded, multiprocess implementation using ubiquitous and well-established high-performance computing (HPC) programming frameworks such as OpenMP and MPI. Such techniques are used in compute-intensive defense, aerospace, and industrial applicatio... [read more]

White Paper: Implementation of Real-Time Spectrum Analysis

Dr. Florian Ramian (Rohde & Schwarz GmbH)

Measuring signals in real time means: do not lose any signal. But how can we get rid of the blind times?

Improved specifications meet application demands

Joe Pavlat (Editorial Director)

The summer of 2013 has, and will continue to see, PICMG release a rash of specifications that extend beyond general applications.

PC/104 Consortium technical update: Stackable PCs from ISA to PCI to PCI Express

Jim Blazer (RTD Embedded Technologies)

The PC/104 Consortium continues evolving the stackable PC architecture, most notably with developments in their PCI Express specification, PCIe/104.

Military avionics designs embrace common standards and TRLs

John McHale (Editorial Director)

The task of improving situational awareness for military pilots in a tough budget climate with little development funding available requires designers to use open architectures and common standards to keep costs down. This trend also has fueled the enthusiasm behind the FACE Consortium, which promis... [read more]

The distribution of things: IoT, M2M, and software distribution

Curt Schwaderer (Editorial Director)

The Internet of Things combines smart devices and sensors with analytics and the cloud. This paradigm shift presents new challenges involving software distribution, updates, and security.

The Deep Packet Inspection spectrum: Evolution from technology development to plug-and-play products

Curt Schwaderer (Technology Editor)

Demystifying multi-core architecture for avionics

Patrick Huyck (Green Hills Software)

Avionics system architects making design decisions today are often frustrated by an expensive problem - having to perform a substantial redesign because an existing system lacked the flexibility required to support an update. Such inflexible barriers in the design process may be overcome by using ne... [read more]

Efficient over-the-air software and firmware updates for the Internet of Things

Roger Ordman (Red Bend Software)

With the Internet of Things (IoT) boom, the number and types of smart devices is growing, and so is the amount of software in these devices. Competitive markets lead to shorter time to market and hence half-baked products, requiring fixes to core software even soon after release. Subsequently, there... [read more]

Advances in EDA design methodologies led by next-generation FPGAs

Mike Demler, Editorial Director (OpenSystems Media)

As FPGA vendors strive to make their devices more SoC- and ASIC-like, they are collaborating with EDA companies to more seamlessly integrate their tools. This produces great benefits for designers as FPGA design methodologies are leading the way to new capabilities in areas such as Electronic System... [read more]

Collaboration equals innovation

Jessica Isquith (President of PICMG)

What continues to make PICMG successful as a standards body is our community of members and your collaboration in pursuit of innovation. As officers of PICMG, our mission is to shepherd and encourage that collaboration, making sure that the process moves along and that member voices are heard. The s... [read more]

What's in the box? Differentiating telecom products from the competition

Gavin Finn (Kaon Interactive)

There is irony in the fact that products designed to bridge communications are often the most difficult to talk about. The problem rests in the complexity of network and telecommunications products, and also the fact that it is nearly impossible to effectively demonstrate what is going on inside the... [read more]

ZigBee Application Profiles converge to bring Smart Energy home

In the context of the residential space, the term "smart energy" can be in reference eitherto the intelligent infrastructure that powers the home, or the smart energy products and applications that reside within it. Silicon Labs' Thomas Barber and Mark Grazier of Texas Instruments explain how ZigB... [read more]

Embedded signal processing enables advanced radars and EW systems with low latency

John McHale (Editorial Director)

Modern radar and electronic warfare designs rely heavily on embedded computing systems that leverage high-speed commercial processors and FPGAs to find every target or signal and enable the warfighter to respond in real time. Meanwhile, signal processing system designers are cutting costs by using p... [read more]

Exploiting MOSA software for high-performance ISR and signal processing applications

Michael Stern (GE Intelligent Platforms)

High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) is rapidly becoming mainstream in the mil/aero embedded computing world, bringing with it the potential to solve increasingly challenging problems such as that of processing ISR and other signal processing data. The key for developers, however, is to make t... [read more]

Maturing VITA 46.11 to address VPX-specific needs

Mark Overgaard (Pigeon Point Systems)

VITA 46.11, System Management on VPX, was adopted as a draft standard for trial use (DSTU) in late 2013. Since then, the VITA 46.11 working group has pursued a systematic plan to complete a fully ratified ANSI/VITA 46.11-2015, which was accomplished in June. This article describes that maturation wo... [read more]

MicroTCA.4 continues culture of COTS signal processing at DESY

Brandon Lewis (Assistant Managing Editor)

In this interview with engineers in the Machine Beam Controls Group at DESY, Holger Schlarb and Michael Fenner discuss the data acquisition requirements of the accelerator community, as well as how a tradition of using COTS signal processing solutions continues to improve uptime and maximize perform... [read more]

Full speed ahead: FACE initiative fosters reuse, cuts costs and delivery time of military avionics systems

Staff (Military Embedded Systems)

The Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical Standard aims to hasten delivery and cut costs of military avionics systems via a modular architecture, data models, standard interfaces, and conformance criteria that meld to enable reusable software components and a common operating envir... [read more]