By: dl

How long can a system interconnect maintain its legs? One of the early fabrics for embedded computing, Mercury Computer Systems’ RACEway and its follow-on RACE++ are well into their second decade of service, most particularly in military applications. Today, the default interconnect for next-gen MIL systems is not a RACE++ crossbar switch fabric, but OpenVPX–a fabric-agnostic interconnect that’s equally at home with RapidIO, PCI Express, Ethernet and a variety of fabric topologies. Nevertheless, the appeal of legacy can be very strong.

According to Robert McGrail, Director of Marketing at Mercury Computer Systems/Advanced Computing Solutions, of the company’s installed base in more than 300 defense programs, over 200 are based on RACE++, and “many of our customers are looking for upgrades to currently deployed systems, tech refreshes that can be put in place quickly and with minimal risk to the overall program.”

By refreshing the processor technology in a system, performance can be boosted by between 30 and 50% “through simple board swaps,” said Steve Patterson, Vice President of Defense Product Line Management at Mercury.  He noted recent RACE++ tech refresh activity in signals intelligence applications, as well as radar systems for both manned and unmanned platforms.

www.mc.com/mediacenter/pressrelease.aspx?id=13452

By: dl

VITA has released its fourth semi-annual State of the VME Technology Industry report, authored by executive director Ray Alderman. The 12-page report first reviews business conditions in the “critical embedded systems markets:” MIL/COTS, industrial, medical and telecom. It then explores the trends in the semiconductor industry and discusses their significance for the future of embedded computer design. The author next gives us an update on merger and acquisition activity over the past six months, with some perspective on trends and some analysis of the significance of various examples. Alderman caps off the report by discussing what business models do and don’t work in the current era of embedded computing.

“This industry has shown amazing resilience to difficult economic conditions in the past,” Alderman writes. “But these times are very different from previous experience. I believe that the board markets, in general, will move back to their original roots of profitable “niches,” and away from the commodity high-volume/low-margin models introduced by the telecom and industrial motherboard segments. Those commodity models have shown that they have very little ability to adapt to severe economic conditions.”

www.vita.com/mktoverview.html

By lw

ReportLinker.com has published a new research report on the worldwide market for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The report profiles 154 companies and provides what it calls “separate comprehensive analytics” for the U.S., Europe, Asia-Pacific region, Middle East, and Rest of World. Annual forecasts are provided for each region out through 2015.

www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/reportlinker-adds-world-unmanned-aerial-vehidles-uav-amp-system-market-report,827400.shtml