By: dl

I suffered a bit of nostalgia a few months ago when one embedded computing company rolled out a big bunch of products, some of which looked very familiar. I realized they were familiar to me because they were continuations of board families, but board families from companies that had disappeared as independent entities many years ago. These companies had, of course, been acquired. It was great to see the different legacies being pursued and a diversity of customers served over the long haul.

It’s now spring, and a whiff of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is in the air. Sources are saying that the current line-up of embedded computing companies may look quite different later this year, particularly in the mil/aero segment. Some big embedded computing companies might expand or contract their empires, some medium size companies might get gobbled up, and a dark horse just might ride in from outside the embedded world.

Several of the larger embedded computing companies are themselves the product of acquisitions in an earlier age. The Embedded Computing group of Curtiss-Wright Controls , for instance, was stitched together from Vmetro, Synergy Microsystems, DY-4, Vista Controls, Pentland and Peritek, plus a couple of verticals. For its part, GE Intelligent Platforms (formerly GE Fanuc) was built up from Computer Dynamics, VMIC, Radstone and others, including SBS. That company had itself taken a stab at empire building in an earlier era, bringing Greenspring, Logical Design Group, Bit 3, VI Computer, OR Computer and others under the SBS umbrella.

Elsewhere, empires have been built by Kontron, with its acquisition of PEP Modular Computers, Thales Computer, Teknor, Jumptec,  Matrix, Intel’s rackmount server operation and others; and by Emerson Network Systems, which gobbled up Motorola’s embedded computer group, Force Computers, Heurikon, Blue Wave Systems, Mizar, Prolog and others. Some of the empires have worked out very well, and some have not.

What’s behind the next M&A wave? The pundits will certainly come up with their reasons, but perhaps it’s all just anxiety driven. Waves come in and waves go out, while companies shrink and grow when they’re afraid that they’re too big or too small to survive, that they’re not sufficiently diversified or have stretched themselves too thin, etc., or they can see from their market numbers that they’ve clearly bet on the wrong horse.

Is a new board vendor shuffle a good thing for the marketplace? Yes and no. We’ll have to wait and see how good the acquirers are at empire building.

By: lw

Casual attendees at the January Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas may have been surprised to see an FPGA mezzanine card (FMC) on display in the consumer TV pavilion, courtesy of Xilinx Inc.’s Targeted Design Platform. VITA hoped for great things with VITA 57 FMC, but consumer products weren’t necessarily high on the agenda. If FMC could move beyond automotive, military, and factory-floor roots and into the digital den, the economies of scale would be significant.

In theory, a modular card in a retail product might represent a greater advantage than it already shows in mil/aero and industrial markets. Interfaces requiring programmable logic for implementation, such as High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) or DisplayPort, could be implemented on the FMC. At the very least, the OEM could swap out cards to differentiate product lines before moving into the distribution chain. Ideally, the FMC could be exchanged by the retail dealer or perhaps the end customer.

To some extent, this is precisely what Xilinx had in mind. When it introduced the Targeted Design Platform (TDP) concept in early 2009, the theory went far beyond evaluation boards for vertical markets. The Xilinx TDPs included middleware, soft IP cores and license rights, development and debugging software, and sample application software. When Xilinx partnered with Tokyo Electron Device Inc. for the digital TV market, the FMC-based TDP was meant to make customization easy and cheap. Harry Raftopoulos, director of consumer segment marketing at Xilinx, said that the smaller budgets and tighter schedules experienced by consumer-product OEMs in the post-2008 economy mandated that they could not spend months studying LVDS, HDMI, and DisplayPort interfaces. Hence, the arrival of FMC allowed strapped vendors to accelerate the design cycle.

But before we get too excited about VITA 57 gaining a market dwarfing any other, let’s realize that Xilinx and TED are wonderful drum majors for this parade – but they’re missing the multitudes of followers behind them. The FMC standard still must overcome public perceptions regarding previous mezzanine standards such as PMC and XMC (VITA 42). Sure, the earlier mezzanines did have and continue to have devout adherents, but the use of the cards hasn’t radicalized product delivery methods moving all the way out to the end user. There is an analogy here to the evolution of fiber optic interfaces on networking boards. New Multi-Source Agreement modules like SFP, XFP. and SFP+ certainly are much easier to use than a 300-pin optical module. But no MSA form factor has achieved the ubiquity of an RJ-11 or RJ-45 Ethernet jack.

Think of the years of development efforts that have gone into turning USB from an interface for printers and peripherals to a veritable fashion accessory when integrated in a memory stick or a communications device. A USB stick played a starring role in the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and USBs now represent an alternative way of releasing a music album, next to LPs and CDs and digital files. The proponents of HDMI or DisplayPort interfaces would like to see their own interfaces become USB equivalents, but the FMC advocates insist that it’s easier to make the mezzanine module a universal “great equalizer.”

Let’s look at what has happened in networking and enterprise IT markets. PMC and XMC have gained popularity as a means of increasing Ethernet, Fibre Channel or T1/T3 port density on network equipment, but the message regarding ease of use has only migrated as far as the OEM. Network distributors and system integrators do not stock PMC or XMC cards the way they would stock PCI Express NICs, for example. PIMG was hoping that the overall standards for ATCA and MicroTCA would drag the AMC mezzanine in their wake, but these standards have not been widely adopted. Truth be told, the networking and telecom equipment markets are not healthy enough these days, in terms of numbers of OEMs, to support common backplanes and subsystem interfaces.

For mil/aero and industrial control markets, there are solid reasons to consider OpenVPX, and solid reasons to adopt mezzanine board form factors that emphasize reprogrammability. In consumer worlds, such efforts have to fit with an end-user “plug and play” perception, and must be driven beyond the tier of OEM to have staying power. The VPX Marketing Alliance, working on its own, can’t promote FMC, but neither can a single vendor alliance like Xilinx/TED. The Xilinx demonstration represents a good preview as to what is possible if FMC is used in consumer devices. Now, the trick is to get the IEEE, the trade associations for HDMI and DisplayPort, and similar coalitions behind this effort. FMC needs a cheering section of thousands to gain the traction it deserves.

By: ra

Just when you thought we were done creating “bus specifications” for all the serial fabrics, two more initiatives show-up on our radar here at OAR. Actually, these are not “buses” as we have defined them in the past. They are, instead, glorified wiring harness specifications for connecting subsystem components into a system architecture: in one case for satellites; in another for airplanes.

Some of the connections in these specifications, such as power feeds to the LRU (line replaceable units), are likely to be multidropped like a classic bus. The data connections, however, will almost certainly be point-to-point. The systems management and monitoring connections could be either multidropped or point-to-point. It’s unclear as yet whether the external connections to these subsystems will be proprietary or open, but the internal connections will probably be proprietary.

One of the exciting efforts on this front is a satellite plug-and-play bus being developed and funded by the U.S. Air Force with the goal of creating COTS-based satellite components that can be put together in days and launched at a very low cost.  (See  Northrop Grumman to Design Air Force Plug-and-Play Spacecraft Bus  and Air Force extends plug-and-play spacecraft. ) As might be expected, NASA has also been deeply involved in this effort, and Northrop Grumman recently received a contract to further its development.

The objective of this project is to create a basic satellite platform–with all the power, data, control, and monitoring lines defined and wired-up–so that small mission-specific LRU’s can be designed and easily plugged together. This would reduce the time-to-launch of a new satellite down to days or weeks. Data connections for the LRUs, which consist of electronics in a standardized, enclosed metal can (similar to VITA’s V-58 LRU specification), will be accomplished with a TCP/IP compliant router. NASA seems to have plans for launching many “nanosats,” small satellites weighing between 11 and 110 pounds, in communications and networking apps in space. 

What’s the motivation here? you might ask. Consider this scenario. Back in 2007, China shot-down one of its failed satellites, proving that the Chinese can take-out intelligence satellites and, thus, render the military of an opponent blind by shutting off critical communications networks. In 2008, the U.S. Navy shot-down an errant U.S. satellite, proving that we can take out an opponent’s satellites, too.  

Given this scenario, the rationale behind this new standardized satellite bus may be as follows. That the only way for us to counter an opponent’s threat to our intelligence and communications satellites is to put more of them up there faster and cheaper than the other country can build missiles to take them down. If the cost of the missile to shoot down a satellite is higher than the cost of the standardized COTS-based electronics package in the satellite itself, that makes a star wars race a bad business deal for any opponent. 

Another new bus is being developed by the U.S. Navy in conjunction with Honeywell: an avionics bus for cockpit instruments in military aircraft. (See Insider: Honeywell proceeding with caution and U.S. Navy avionics systems integrators embrace open architectures to combat parts obsolescence .) It’s designed to allow easy insertion of new technologies in military aircraft avionics systems to reduce the tremendous obsolescence problems endured by the military for decades. Avionics sales have suffered terribly in this recession, and a new standardized avionics bus may be the key to increased sales in the future. As with the satellite bus discussed above, the new avionics bus is LRU based. It’s expected that once proven in military aircraft, it will rapidly migrate to commercial aircraft.

The avionics bus concept has, of course, been around for decades. Way back when, King made a lot of function boxes (AirNav, Transponders, Artificial Horizons, compass, GPS, Direction Finders, weather radar, COMM, digital displays, etc.) which it interconnected with a proprietary avionics bus. King merged with Bendix, Bendix merged with Allied Signal, and Allied Signal merged with Honeywell. 

Remember when GE announced their purchase of Honeywell back in 2000 ? The US FTC approved the merger, but the EU nixed it, saying it would give GE a monopoly in the avionics market. Some very large companies have their eye on this market, and a new standardized avionics bus that mitigates those pesky obsolescence problems might be the elixir that increases sales and opportunities in the depressed aerospace market. 

Despite the ascendance of open-architecture buses in recent decades, I have some concern that the new avionics bus and satellite bus may be proprietary. Hopefully, depressed market conditions for aircraft and avionics components have changed the old proprietary thinking, and these will truly be open standards. The fact that both rely on enclosed LRU boxes, however, suggests that the interfaces inside the box are not standardized, although the boxes may communicate over an instrument panel bus that will be standardized and open. We’ll have to wait and see.

By: dl

The new members of Intel’s Core i7 microprocessor family  introduced at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show have created quite a stir in the embedded computing community. In his blog, John Keller, editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, suggests that there “may be a tectonic shift” under way that would displace PowerPCs with i7s. 

“While Intel sees the floating point capability of its Core i7 processor as the gateway to a new generation of complex graphics and fast streaming video,” Keller writes, “military systems designers see it as the latest and greatest way to implement signal processing for advanced radar, sonar, electronic warfare, and electro-optical applications with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) single-board computers.” 

He notes that Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, GE Intelligent Platforms, and Extreme Engineering Solutions Inc. all announced i7-based SBCs “within hours of Intel’s introduction.” I’m not quite sure of the exact timing, but Concurrent Technologies, Kontron and Emerson Network Power also bellied up to the i7 bar in short order, and others are sure to follow. 

The SBC makers’ praise of the new Intel entry is enthusiastic, indeed, perhaps even a bit over the top. GE Intelligent Platforms, for example, claims “remarkable performance” for its i7-based boards. “The increased integration and increased density of this new family of processors from Intel offers us astonishing new opportunities,” said Peter Cavill, GM for military and aerospace products at the company. 

And, according to Dirk Finstel, CTO of Kontron AG, that company’s i7 entry represents “the ultimate computing tool MAG HPEC users have been waiting for, allowing them to finally walk away from 10 years of PowerPC Altivec dominance in radar, sonar and imaging applications.” 

Indeed, Freescale and the PowerPC architecture may have become vulnerable in high-end signal processing applications that hear the clarion cry of Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions. And Freescale may have lost some of its fans by leaving Altivec out of its newest CPU core (See End of Altivec PowerPC digital signal processing chip spells headache for Serial RapidIO designers), while in some signal processing arenas, PowerPCs have been replaced by designs based on FPGAs.  

On the other hand, old timers in the arena recall Intel’s on-again, off-again love affair with the embedded world, with buses such as Multibus II that went from prince to frog in short order, microprocessors such as the i960 that quickly went from star to red-headed stepchild within a decade and other such items. Is Intel in it for the long haul this time? 

Who knows. But in the meantime, let the i7 games begin!

By: ra

The demise of backplane-based computing systems has long been predicted, but the horizon is now coming into view. For the past decade or more, we have seen one embedded board segment after another drop backplane-based computer systems and move to interconnected motherboards, small form factor boards or little computing boxes. The industrial segment, using CAN, Profibus and Ethernet, quit using backplane-based systems long ago. That initiated the demise of STD, ISA, EISA and PCI backplanes. CompactPCI (cPCI) came on the scene about the time the shift away from backplanes occurred and was never heavily used in industrial applications.

The medical industry (MRI, CATscan, PETscan, CT, etc.) moved away from backplane-based VME and cPCI systems a few years ago, migrating to motherboard-based boxes interconnected with high-speed serial interconnects. Many medical apps have only a few control requirements (e.g., moving a beam into position), and image reconstruction is easily done with a commercial motherboard of some kind. These systems have no real time, shock, vibration or extended temperature requirements, so they can use cheap commercial 1U motherboard boxes interconnected with some networking technology like Ethernet.

That leaves two remaining markets for backplane-based systems: telecom and military. Telecom has been procrastinating about going to interconnected and stacked black boxes for years. They still have the old POTS mentality that favors backplane-based switch gear and have not made the mental or financial transition to a pure IP (Internet Protocol) communications system.

That change must happen in the next few years, so telecom may be the next segment to abandon backplane-based systems and go to large stacks of interconnected 1U boxes, especially as the telecom industry becomes more and more commoditized. The only remaining concern for them to resolve is how to maintain those systems: i.e, how to easily remove and replace the boxes in the rack.

That leaves us with military systems as potentially the last computing segment to rely on backplanes to carry their primary interconnect. But that, too, will change. Real-world requirements mean that the military will ultimately also move away from backplanes and go to stacked “boxes” known as LRU’s (line replaceable units), which are defined in the VITA-58 specification.

Today the military spends millions of dollars training soldiers to repair and maintain their sophisticated electronic systems. These people typically leave the military and take that extensive (and expensive) training to the civilian world after a single tour. A technician may be in a military training school for over a year, and then it takes about six months for them to become proficient in the field. They work at their job for a year or two, and then leave the service.

The upshot is that the military must use regular soldiers to maintain and repair systems in the field by simply swapping out LRU’s, while only career soldiers doing depot maintenance get computer training. Telecoms are seeing the same scenario: they spend millions on training and education and then lose those employees to other firms.

The primary people who repair and maintain systems on the battlefield must be the soldiers who operate those platforms in battle. They will simply pull-out failed LRU’s and slide-in replacements. The non-functioning box goes back to a depot where trained technicians will replace failed components and put the “box” back into the replacement LRU supply chain.

This suite of military requirements will drive computers to LRU’s.

o A critical military system must be repaired and battle-ready in 30 minutes or less.

o The people who maintain and repair that system must require no more than 10 minutes of training.

o No tools must be required to repair the system and make it battle-ready in 30 minutes or less.

o No unit can weigh more than 37 pounds for a two-man (or woman) lift.

Of course, the military has too many legacy platforms to make this change quickly. There are too many ATR boxes in aircraft, too many VME chassis in weapons platforms and helicopters, etc. Moreover, the serial interconnect technologies to connect those LRU’s (various fabrics and Ethernet) are too unstable. That is to say, their transmission frequencies keep going up, their electrical signaling protocols are changing from 8B/10B to PAM, their associated semiconductor chips have an 18- to 24-month life cycle, etc. Just looking at the number of refreshes to existing VME backplane-based systems says it will be decades before we can make the switch to LRU-based MIL systems, although a few are now going to deployment.

Down the road, the incentive to abandon backplane-based systems and even copper interconnects will grown even greater. As we move to 10G links and, as a consequence, adopt optical interconnects, the era will favor 6-foot, 19-inch racks of commercial boxes and ATR boxes of LRU’s woven together with 10G optical connections.

Ultimately, the highest costs of computing equipment in telecom and MIL applications are the life-cycle costs: installing, maintaining and keeping that gear functioning. Doing that requires highly trained, intelligent and expensive people at the repair depot. The only way out of the present cost trap is to use LRU’s as stackable boxes for the field, maintained by regular soldiers or employees.

Are we finally seeing the demise of copper backplanes? Yes. We have seen it occur in industrial and medical apps already. Telecom is next. And when 10G optical connections are inexpensive and stable, MIL apps will drop backplanes, too. But it will take the MIL segment a decade or more to make the shift. Until then, the MIL segment will be the only remaining market for copper backplane-based embedded computing systems.