Military Embedded Systems July/August 2019

@military_cots

John McHale

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Space history, podcasts, new staff

Mil Tech Insider

Using frameworks in machine learning

Mil Tech Trends

Thermal issues in horizontal-mount

Industry Spotlight

Big data on the battlefield MIL-EMBEDDED.COM

Cyberwarfare: Battlefield precursor for kinetic attacks?

P 14

12 36 40

July/August 2019 | Volume 15 | Number 5

P 28 Enabling SWaP-optimized EW solutions through accurate FPGA power modeling, By Mario LaMarche, Mercury Systems

Rugged, smart military displays and their commercial influence P 18

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Defense & Aerospace Manufacturing

Volume 15 Number 5

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July/August 2019

SPECIAL REPORT

Cyberwarfare Technology 14 Cyberwarfare: Battlefield precursor for kinetic attacks?

COLUMNS Editor’s Perspective 8 Old space computers, current podcasts, and new staff

By John McHale

By Sally Cole, Senior Editor

MIL TECH TRENDS 14

Military Rugged Computing & Thermal Management 18 Rugged, smart military displays and their commercial influence

By Emma Helfrich, Associate Editor

22

Cool world: A tour of thermal-management approaches for rugged computer systems

By Jason Shields, Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions

18

28

Enabling SWaP-optimized EW solutions through accurate FPGA power modeling

University Update 10 Composite metal foam stops .50-caliber rounds as well as steel

By Sally Cole

Mil Tech Insider 12 Using frameworks in machine learning

By Tammy Carter

DEPARTMENTS 46

Connecting with Mil Embedded

By Mil-Embedded.com Editorial Staff

By Mario LaMarche, Mercury Systems

32

Conduction-cooling advancements complement ultra-compact servers in battle versus excessive heat

By Chris A. Ciufo, General Micro Systems

36 32

Thermal and rugged considerations for horizontal-mount chassis platforms

By Justin Moll and Jacques Houde, Pixus Technologies

40

WEB RESOURCES INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

Leveraging Big Data for Military Applications 40 The big data battlefield

By Richard Whaley, Mercury Systems

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MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

ON THE COVER: Top image: Existing vulnerabilities within weapons systems must be addressed now to avoid serious threats from cyberattacks during future battles. In photo: Cyberwarfare specialists serving with the Maryland Air National Guard’s 175th Cyberspace Operations Group train at Warfield Air National Guard Base. Air Force photo by J.M. Eddins Jr./U.S. Department of Defense.

Bottom image: Newer rugged military displays are able to use 4K resolution, often designed right into a display’s software. Image courtesy ZMicro.

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GROUP EDITORIAL DIRECTOR John McHale john.mchale@opensysmedia.com ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Lisa Daigle lisa.daigle@opensysmedia.com SENIOR EDITOR Sally Cole sally.cole@opensysmedia.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR Emma Helfrich emma.helfrich@opensysmedia.com DIRECTOR OF E-CAST LEAD GENERATION AND AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT Joy Gilmore joy.gilmore@opensysmedia.com ONLINE EVENTS SPECIALIST Sam Vukobratovich sam.vukobratovich@opensysmedia.com CREATIVE DIRECTOR Stephanie Sweet stephanie.sweet@opensysmedia.com SENIOR WEB DEVELOPER Aaron Ganschow aaron.ganschow@opensysmedia.com WEB DEVELOPER Paul Nelson paul.nelson@opensysmedia.com CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER Joann Toth joann.toth@opensysmedia.com EMAIL MARKETING SPECIALIST Drew Kaufman drew.kaufman@opensysmedia.com VITA EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Jerry Gipper jerry.gipper@opensysmedia.com

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WWW.OPENSYSMEDIA.COM PRESIDENT Patrick Hopper patrick.hopper@opensysmedia.com EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT John McHale john.mchale@opensysmedia.com EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Rich Nass rich.nass@opensysmedia.com CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Rosemary Kristoff rosemary.kristoff@opensysmedia.com EMBEDDED COMPUTING BRAND DIRECTOR Rich Nass rich.nass@opensysmedia.com

EVENTS

ECD EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Brandon Lewis brandon.lewis@opensysmedia.com ASSOCIATE TECHNOLOGY EDITOR Laura Dolan laura.dolan@opensysmedia.com SENIOR TECHNOLOGY EDITOR Alix Paultre alix.paultre@opensysmedia.com

AUSA 2019 Annual Meeting & Exposition

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October 14-17, 2019 Washington, DC ausameetings.org/2019annualmeeting/

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EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE

Old space computers, current podcasts, and new staff

By John McHale, Editorial Director This summer, two events celebrate 50th anniversaries – one is significant to the whole world, while the other likely only to two 75-year-olds in Florida. Eight days from this writing, it will be July 20, 2019, marking 50 years since Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked on the moon.

Less than two months after that momentous date, I turn 50.

You can guess which one my parents find more important. Both Aldrin and Armstrong are in the Astronaut Hall of Fame down at Cape Canaveral, while I’m in the “Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda” exhibit. Kidding, of course: That exhibit doesn’t exist … yet.

Finally, after nearly two weeks, the team tested the refurbished machine by loading “a rare Apollo memory module” from a museum. After powering up the machine, the team saw an activity light go on and “for the first time in 50 years, the computer ran its original software – a program called Retread that was a set of diagnostic routines used to test computer operations.”

Sadly, we lost Armstrong a few years ago, but Aldrin is just short of 90 and going strong, with a healthy Twitter account.

Other nuggets from the Journal article included that NASA purchased some 60% of all ICs “produced in the U.S. between 1962 and 1967” and that the first computer chips that MIT tested cost $1,000 each, dropping to $15 apiece by the time of the moon landing.

Not all of the technology from those days can boast the same.

However, some computer technicians have brought back to life an Apollo lunar lander computer that been in the possession of private collector Jimmie Loocke for years.

To read the whole story, visit https://www.wsj.com/articles/anapollo-spacecraft-computer-is-brought-back-to-life-11563152761.

Also, be sure to check out the Journal’s complete coverage of the moon landing anniversary. They’ve done nice work.

Volunteer computer technicians repaired and brought back to life Loocke’s computer, according to a Wall Street Journal article titled “An Apollo Spacecraft Computer is Brought to Back to Life,” by Robert Lee Hotz: “Eldon Hall, the digitalcomputing pioneer who led the team that designed the computer at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, verified the unit’s authenticity in 2004. It had been used for ground tests, he says, to certify the lunar lander as safe for human flight.”

For more on the electronics space applications, please listen to The New Space Race podcast series I’m hosting. I interview experts from Cobham, Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions, Harris Corp, and Wind River on topics that include changing reliability requirements, open architecture initiatives, and the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) in space. The series is sponsored

by Wind River and be found at https://www.windriver.com/ events/the-new-space-race/.

Hotz writes that it was Hall who pushed for the use of integrated circuits (ICs) to help create computers small, rugged, and powerful enough to get the astronauts safely to the moon.

Podcasts are fun and I’m quite enjoying them, not only the work on the space series but also the chats I’m having on my McHale Report podcasts, including recent ones on the F-35 avionics with Bryant Henson, vice president and general manager with Harris Corp., and on the military unmanned aircraft market with Mike Blades, VP of Research and Consulting with Frost & Sullivan. You can find the McHale Report podcasts at http://mil-embedded.com/category/podcast/.

Reducing size, while maintaining ruggedness and improving performance … sounds like a familiar problem.

According to Hotz, the team of volunteers called themselves “computer archeologists … [and] … labored on their own time without NASA’s official sanction or support.”

On their first look they found the “machine’s semiconductor chips still looked new, the power supply was functional, [and] the 4,000 interconnecting wires gleamed, untarnished,” Hotz reports. However, problems obviously existed as the archaeologists also had to deal with “circuit faults, corroded connectors, and scrambled signals.”

Interestingly, they were able to replace a couple faulty diodes by heading to a local repair shop as the parts were still available even after fifty years – “sold in bags of 15 for a dollar.”

Some things never become obsolete.

8 July/August 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

In a short time, I expect our new Associate Editor Emma Helfrich to join me in hosting podcasts. Helfrich, who joined us last month, is a graduate of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she was the copy chief for the school’s newspaper, The Lumberjack.

Based in our Scottsdale, Arizona headquarters, Helfrich will be covering all topics, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence and cyber defense. She penned her first feature on trends in rugged displays, which you can read on page 18.

Helfrich is a talented writer and editor and we’re excited to have her on board. She can be reached at emma.helfrich@ opensysmedia.com. www.mil-embedded.com

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

Composite metal foam stops .50-caliber rounds as well as steel

By Sally Cole, Senior Editor A hard armor system crafted from composite metal foam takes hits as well as conventional steel armor, but at half the weight, a development that could potentially help revolutionize the design of military vehicles by improving their armor protectio, without making them heavier.

North Carolina State University (NCSU) researchers have shown that vehicle armor made out of composite metal foam (CMF) can stop ball and armor-piercing .50-caliber rounds as well as conventional steel armor, even though the CMF weighs less than half as much. CMF is a foam that consists of hollow metallic spheres, which can be crafted from stainless steel or titanium, embedded within a matrix made of steel, titanium, aluminum, or other metallic alloys.

For this study, the researchers used steel-steel CMF, which means that both the spheres and the matrix are made of steel. They created a hard armor system that consists of a ceramic face plate, a CMF core, and a thin backplate made of aluminum. They tested it using a .50-caliber ball and armor-piercing rounds fired at impact velocities from 500 meters/second up to 885 meters/second. The armor system held up impressively, as the CMF layer of the armor was able to absorb 72% to 75% of the kinetic energy of the ball rounds and 68% to 78% of the kinetic energy of the armor-piercing rounds.

“The CMF armor is less than half the weight of the rolled homogenous steel armor needed to achieve the same level of protection,” explains Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NCSU. Rabiei – who first developed the strong metal foam for use in transportation and military applications – has spent years developing and testing CMF materials. She and her collaborators were able to achieve significant weight savings without sacrificing protection.

The group’s work shows that CMF “offers a significant advantage for vehicle armor, but there is still room for improvement,” Rabiei points out. “These findings stem from testing armors we made by simply combining steel-steel CMF with off-the-shelf ceramic face plates, an aluminum backplate, and adhesive material. We simply optimized our CMF material and replaced the steel plate in standard vehicle armor with steel-steel CMF armor.”

Additional work could be done to make the CMF even better: “For example, we would like to optimize the adhesion and thickness of the ceramic, CMF, and aluminum layers, which may lead to even lower total weight and improved efficiency of the final armor.”

In related work announced earlier this year, Rabiei and her collaborators demonstrated that CMFs can block blast pressure and fragmentation at 5,000 feet/second from high-explosive incendiary rounds detonating only 18 inches away. Her team also showed that CMFs are able to stop a 7.62 by 63 mm M2 armor-piercing projectile at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 mm. For context, the National Institute of Justice standard allows for up to 44 mm of indentation in the back of armor.

As part of this earlier work, the team discovered that steel-CMF “offers much more protection than all other existing armor materials while lowering the weight remarkably,”

10 July/August 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

›

Figure 1 | A sample of an early composite metal foam developed in Rabiei’s research group.

Credit: Afsaneh Rabiei.

Rabiei says. “We can provide as much protection as existing steel armor at a fraction of the weight, or provide much more protection at the same weight.”

This finding is notable because “many military vehicles use armor made of rolled homogenous steel, which weighs three times as much as our steel-CMF,” she notes. “Based on tests like these, we believe we can replace that rolled steel with steel-CMF without sacrificing safety; better blocking not only the fragments but also the blast waves that are responsible for trauma such as major brain injuries. That could reduce vehicle weight significantly, and improve fuel mileage and vehicle performance.”

Beyond the strength findings, Rabiei’s group has also shown that CMFs are extremely effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays, and neutron radiation and are able to handle fire and heat twice as well as the plain metals they’re made of.

“In short, CMFs hold promise for a variety of applications – space exploration to shipping nuclear waste, explosives, hazardous materials, military and security applications, and even cars, buses, and trains,” Rabiei says.

This most recent work was done with support from the Department of Defense’s Joint Aviation Survivability Program, under award number W911W615-D-0001-0001. www.mil-embedded.com

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MIL TECH INSIDER

Using frameworks in machine learning

By Tammy Carter An industry perspective from Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions A framework is a toolbox for creating, training, and validating deep-learning neural networks. Using a high-level programming API, it hides the complexities of the underlying algorithms to greatly simplify and speed up development.

Like deep learning, frameworks are evolving rapidly. This column will focus on frameworks that work with NVIDIA’s TensorRT, a tool for deploying highperformance deep neural networks.

Currently, the most popular framework is TensorFlow, an open-source software library created and supported by Google.

Based on the Python programming language, TensorFlow supports C++ and R. A highly flexible system capable of running on multiple CPUs and GPUs, it can be used on desktop computers, servers, or mobile devices without rewriting code.

TensorFlow supports the visualization of computation graphs. For example, a matrix multiplication would be represented by a node, while the two incoming edges would correspond to the incoming edge, and the result would be the outgoing edge. Because TensorFlow is a low-level library, creating models can be challenging and complex.

Keras, also written in Python, is a simplified interface that enables efficient neural nets to be built with minimum code. Since it runs on top of TensorFlow, MXNet, and other frameworks, Keras is surging in popularity. This user-friendly framework minimizes the numbers of APIs, and it is modular for easier model construction. Less configurable than lower level frameworks, Keras works well for beginners who want to learn how to use various machine-learning models and quickly understand how they work.

PyTorch is based on Torch, a Lua-based open-source machine library. Developed

by Facebook’s artificial-intelligence research group, PyTorch features complex tensor computation and strong GPU

12 July/August 2019

acceleration support. With basic Python knowledge, users can build deep-learning models without a steep learning curve. Its PyTorch architecture simplifies the deep-modeling process and offers more transparency than Torch. It also supports both data parallelism and distributed learning. With its many pretrained models, PyTorch makes a good choice for prototyping and small projects (a C++ interface is in beta testing).

MXNet is designed for high efficiency, productivity, and flexibility. Supporting multiple popular programming languages – including Python, R, C++, and Julia – MXNet lets users train a deep-learning model without having to learn a new language. Like PyTorch, its back end is written in C++ and CUDA. Supporting recurrent neural networks (RNN), convolution neural networks (CNN), and long-short term memory (LTSM) networks, MXNet is touted for its imaging, handwriting/speech recognition, and forecasting capabilities. It scales well across multiple CPUs and GPUs, making it useful for enterprise solutions. Gluon, another simplified front end for MXNT like Keras, also supports a model zoo of predefined and pretrained models.

The original Caffe framework is best known for solving image-processing tasks, especially visual recognition, but does not perform well for non-vision network design, reduced math precision, or distributed computation. It supports MATLAB as well as C, C++, Python, and a model zoo. To address these shortcomings, Facebook created Caffe2 to support its applications; currently, Caffe2 is being merged into PyTorch.

NVIDIA maintains a separate fork of Caffe (“NVIDIA Caffe” or “NVCaffe”) tuned for multiple-GPU configurations and mixed precision support. It features layer-wise adaptive rate control (LARC) with adaptive global gradient scaler for improved accuracy, especially for 16-bit floating-point training.

NVIDIA TensorRT is a high-performance inference engineering tool designed to deliver maximum throughput, low latency, and power efficiency in the deployed network. It provides APIs in C++ and Python. Trained models are optimized by first restructuring to remove layers with no output, and then fusing and aggregating the remaining layers. The model is then optimized and calibrated to use lower precision (such as INT8 or FP16). For example, a TensorFlow CNN on an NVIDIA V100 can process 305 images/second. When the CNN is optimized with TensorRT, the output is 5700 images/second. (Framework training comparison from NVIDIA is available at https://developer.nvidia.com/deep-learning-performance-training-inference) All of these frameworks are open source, are available on GitHub, and can be deployed using NVIDIA’s TensorRT. The Caffe, TensorFlow, Pytorch, and MXNET frameworks are supported by Bright Cluster Manager in Curtiss-Wright’s OpenHPEC Accelerator Suite of development tools.

Choosing the right framework depends on the type of network being developed, the programming language and tools, and the user’s skill set Tammy Carter is senior product manager for OpenHPEC products, Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions.

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Special Report CYBERWARFARE TECHNOLOGY

Cyberwarfare: Battlefield precursor for kinetic attacks?

By Sally Cole, Senior Editor The cyber domain is playing a more visible role in offensive military operations, but serious vulnerabilities exist within weapons systems that must be addressed today to avoid being rendered useless via cyberattacks during future battles.

Existing vulnerabilities within weapons systems must be addressed now to avoid serious threats from cyberattacks during future battles. In photo: Cyberwarfare specialists serving with the Maryland Air National Guard’s 175th Cyberspace Operations Group train at Warfield Air National Guard Base. Air Force photo by J.M. Eddins Jr./U.S. Department of Defense.

Cyberwarfare is an intriguing way to prepare battlefields for kinetic attacks; we recently got a glimpse of this when Iran shot down a U.S. military drone – allegedly operating within international airspace in June 2019 – and the U.S. responded with a cyberattack intended to disarm some of Iran’s weapon systems’ command-andcontrol systems.

Situations like these don’t necessarily mean cyberattacks will become the go-to response in some situations rather than launching a missile, but they’re certainly an option.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the recent U.S.-Iran altercation “is that the U.S. claimed that they engaged in a cyberattack against Iran,” says Richard Stiennon, founder and chief research analyst for IT-Harvest (Birmingham, Michigan), an IT security industry analyst

14 July/August 2019

firm. “It’s fairly unheard of to attack a military’s capabilities by cyber means without going through all of the normal geopolitical steps when you suspect someone has bombed a tanker or blown up a drone.”

With cyber operations, either you want to be discovered or you don’t. “If the goal of your operation is intelligence gathering, you probably don’t want it to be attributed to you because you don’t want the target to know you’ve stolen data from them,” says Priscilla Moriuchi, director of strategic threat development for Recorded Future (Somerville, Massachusetts), an internet technology company that specializes in realtime threat intelligence. “When it comes to an active operation like the recent attack on Iran, it’s likely that the U.S. wanted to message to Iran that we did it. If they don’t know who it was, they could lash out at an innocent party.”

It’s unlikely that any single military domain will emerge as the standard response, because “you can’t win a war with just the Air Force,” Stiennon points out. “This has been demonstrated over and over again, but the effects gained from cyberattacks can be real. And there are several advantages because the exposure to loss of life is much lower, the total cost is much lower, and there’s plausible deniability – you can cause the effect like we did with Stuxnet without the risk of escalation.”

But using cyberattacks to prepare the battlefield for launching an attack may be an emerging trend – not one that has just arisen because we aren’t currently engaged in many shooting wars. “Cyberattacks may be used how the artillery barrages used

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WHEN ATTACKS HAPPEN, THE U.S. IS USING A “NAME AND SHAME” APPROACH TO CYBERATTACK ATTRIBUTION. BUT ATTRIBUTION ISN’T ALWAYS EASY, AND IT WILL LIKELY BECOME INCREASINGLY CHALLENGING FOR FUTURE CYBERATTACKS.

for it to be the primary or the first go-to. But it will become a much larger part of conflict broadly going forward.”

How bad are cyberattacks today?

If you view cyber operations broadly, including data and intellectual-property theft, today it includes a wide range of destructive and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks – and the attacks are bad on many levels.

“We’re at a point in the history of the development of internet and information technology that anyone can execute a cyber operation as long as you have a computer and access to the internet,” Moriuchi points out. “The success of an operation will depend on your skill set and access to tools. But anyone, even a kid with a computer and an internet connection, can find an exploit kit online and use it to inflict or victimize anyone who’s vulnerable. There are so many malicious activities online, and the barrier to executing an attack – whether it’s sophisticated or entry-level – is quite low.”

At this stage, there’s rarely a need to go to a more advanced, sophisticated attack posture within a cyber environment, according to Dean Weber, chief technology officer for Mocana (Sunnyvale, California), which develops security platforms for industrial and military elements, typically within constrained environments. “You don’t need to because the systems that you’re attacking aren’t capable of defending against simple attacks,” he says.

There’s a lot of preliminary activity going on to “scout out the terrain, particularly within critical infrastructure,” Stiennon says. “We’re somewhat privy to the Russian and Chinese presence inside our electrical and communication grids, but we have a lot less visibility into whatever the U.S. is doing in other countries’ grids.” to slow down the defense before we had data,” Stiennon explains. “In the recent cyberattack on Iran, it would have been a perfect precursor to launching a kinetic attack. I’m not sure it was a very good strategic move to do it without launching an attack, because it burned their attack methodologies and tools.”

Cyber responses will play an increasing role in conflicts or war scenarios, Moriuchi says, but since there are few identified parameters for cyberwar, this may limit it from becoming the goto response. “There’s no convention or parameters for a response today,” she says. “What exactly makes up an attack vs. intelligence gathering? When you’re a victim everything feels like an attack.

What type of response is proportionate with what countries interpret as a cyberattack or as an act of war? There are too many unknowns within the cyber domain www.mil-embedded.com

Stiennon is seeing more of a willingness on the part of attackers to engage in cyberattacks. “They’re starting to use their resources, thinking that they’re getting some sort of benefit – even if it’s just to intimidate the targets,” he explains. “We’ve had the tools for years but have held back for fear of retribution or exposing the tools. Now attackers seem to be more willing to use them.”

Regarding the intelligence-gathering operations of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, the types of targets that have been hit by foreign militaries have “remained relatively static over time, and they each have their own set of targets they’re interested in,” Moriuchi notes. “China’s military targets have involved private companies and intellectual property, whereas maybe other militaries have not targeted those. What’s changed, especially for Russian threat-actor groups, is weaponizing social media for disinformation or influence campaigns. And we’re seeing some indications on the Iranian side that their military-intelligence services are also choosing to begin exploring foreign-influence operations as a tool as well, and that’s incredibly difficult to counter.”

The disinformation campaigns and techniques the Russians are using appear to be effective. “They’re turning up the volume and amplifying issues and divisions within our society that we’re already choosing to align ourselves along,” Moriuchi adds. “You can counter it with knowledge or identify it from an analytics perspective, what a Russian influence account might look like, but on its face it’s incredibly difficult to counter that type of activity. “Influence operations on social media are really concerning to us.”

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Special Report

CYBERWARFARE TECHNOLOGY

Serious DoD weapons systems vulnerabilities exist One of the main concerns about cyberwarfare is that military systems and weapons are largely vulnerable to being hacked. In 2018, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), “Weapon Systems Cybersecurity: DoD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities,” which revealed the massive scale of vulnerabilities that exist.

“Congress has instructed the DoD to perform an in-depth evaluation of their systems, which is due out in October 2019,” Weber says. “The Navy has already issued a preliminary report essentially saying: ‘Don’t be afraid, but it’s worse than we thought.’”

In the meantime, the DoD should “take intermediary steps right now to defend their systems with new add-ons like firewalls and monitor systems so they can tell you when an attack is being made,” Stiennon says. “But they should also retroactively go back and start fixing the vulnerabilities they built in to all the software. Most of the weapons systems that we know were hacked, according to the Washington Post, in 2008, were sourced in the 1990s when the approach to security was that no hackers could hack these because they don’t have access to a F-35 Joint Strike fighter. And, of course, the hackers do have access to the software they’ve stolen in data breaches. So they need to go back and fix the software, and I’m afraid the cost will be close to a trillion dollars.”

If we get into a battle and lose it because of cyber effects, according to Stiennon, the DoD would likely end up spending that money to fix the problems. “It’s better to spend it now to avoid that battle and loss of life than to wait for it to happen,” he says.

Truly fixing this problem may require going all the way back to the supply chain. “How do you trust the data if you don’t trust the device? The way to secure the device generating the data is to ensure the supply-chain efficacy is intact,” Weber says. “To do that, you need to ensure that all of the discrete and active elements – including software, firmware, hardware processing, trusted platform modules – and other things that go into making a trustworthy system are secure. Then they need to be knitted all together into some kind of a value that states that the platform is trustworthy. And it should be available at intervals or on demand.” (Figure 1.)

Patching can only go so far and is less than ideal for protecting weapons systems. “It’s a constant battle of trying to fix what’s wrong and, in many cases, is often a stitchthem-up and put-them-back-into-battle routine; it doesn’t fix the problem,” Weber adds. “The IT world is already so far down the path that it’s unlikely to get trustworthiness within the near future.’”

To better protect its systems, the DoD could focus on “building cybersecurity in as opposed to waiting until after it’s built and bolting it on,” Weber notes. “Why don’t we do it that way? Because that’s not how it was done in the past. But the whole ‘leastcost’ effort that went on the past several years is changing now. Money is being put back into the system and contracting officers and agents aren’t searching for leastcost as their primary decision logic.”

Attack attribution When attacks happen, the U.S. is using a “name and shame” approach to cyberattack attribution. But attribution isn’t always easy, and it will likely become increasingly challenging for future cyberattacks.

“Attribution is becoming murkier, especially at the nation-state level,” Moriuchi says.

“If you look at China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, there was a period of time before 2013 or 2014, when cyber actors weren’t cognizant of the amount of information they were leaving behind in data trails within the wake of building and executing their operations.”

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Figure 1 | Securing devices means securing the supply chain of all the things that go into those devices.

During this pre-Snowden time, many of the techniques for attribution and tracking threat actors were built. “For many threatactor groups, the data goes back to that era,” Moriuchi notes. “But since then, most of the nation-states’ second- and top-tier actors that we follow have a much greater understanding of the information that they’re leaving behind and the value and downsides to attribution, so they’re changing their techniques.”

China and Iran, for example, are relying on many more commodity tools, like remote-access trojans and penetration test kits that were developed and made available by members of the public. “The code is frequently available online, and they can just tweak and use it in their own operations,” Moriuchi says. “It’s often quite effective and makes attribution incredibly difficult. If you just have indicators about a specific tool, it could be any one of innumerable actor sets, with a bunch of people using one tool.”

While rumors abound of Russia and China or other nation-states teaming up to diminish and degrade the effectiveness of the U.S. military and diplomatic influence, “they’re perceived to be operationally closer and cooperating at the tactical level with joint operations at a much higher rate than they actually are,” Moriuchi says. “We aren’t seeing a lot of sharing of malware or unique, highcapacity cyber tools, because those are quite expensive to develop. If they do create a tool that’s really successful at targeting computer systems, they’d likely want to deploy it against each other. Even if they’re partners, they’re always trying to collect on each other.” MES www.mil-embedded.com

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Mil Tech Trends RUGGED COMPUTING & THERMAL MANAGEMENT

Rugged, smart military displays and their commercial influence

By Emma Helfrich, Associate Editor Commercial technology must process information quickly, be sleek and compact in its design, offer a highresolution image, and remain simple in operation. Rugged military displays must perform similarly but in incredibly harsh environmental conditions.

Manufacturers of military technology are using these industry commonalities as inspiration behind the production of their rugged, smart displays.

Newer rugged military displays are able to use 4K resolution, often designed right into a display’s software. Image courtesy ZMicro.

Military technology moves at a very slow pace in comparison to that of the commercial world and is built to last longer. Military equipment faces many standards and regulations, training periods, cost restrictions, and extensive deployment times that just aren’t a factor in the development of commercial products. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t occasionally influence one another.

“Commercial technology is generally ahead of what the defense community has,” says Aneesh Kothari, vice president of marketing at Systel, Inc. (Sugar Land, Texas).

“Only because it’s easier to not only innovate, but to deploy innovative technology in the commercial world.”

What makes displays rugged?

With military use comes a very specific kind of everyday abuse that leads to the absolutely critical ruggedization of a display. These operating systems see just as much combat as the user and need to be trusted to withstand it.

“Most of the people out in a combat environment – they’re a gaming generation,” says Mike McCormack, president and CEO of CP Tech (San Diego, California). “They’re used to multiple inputs coming into them rapidly and processing that information more rapidly than previous generations.”

“Imagine that you have your display in front of you at your desk,” McCormack says. “Now imagine that I’m going to take you out to the Syrian desert, in the direct sunlight, there’s blowing sand, it’s going to be really cold on some nights, but in the afternoon it may get up to 120 degrees, but I want you to sit here and do the work on these displays. And there’s the possibility of live fire going on around you. You know as well as I do that your equipment is not going to survive.”

Displays are being updated and modified generationally: The requirements are now those of millennial warfighters and a modernized battleground.

The CP Tech TFX rugged display (Figure 1), for example, is optically bonded to resist

That said, designers have retained a feel for what’s coming next in the market and how that’s going to be adopted on the defense side. Rugged displays are no exception.

Consumer technologies that most people are comfortable with using, like multitouch capabilities and 4K resolution, are making their way into military applications.

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www.mil-embedded.com

Putting the equipment through an endof-life scenario simply isn’t an option for these displays and their manufacturers.

A rugged display must meet the customer requirements through various modifications to the LCD and the electronics, but also sustain a five- to 15-year program. No exceptions.

WHILE CONSUMERTECHNOLOGY CAPABILITIES ARE BEING ADOPTED AND IMPLEMENTED IN THE DISPLAY’S DESIGN, THOSE CONCEPTS NEED TO BE ADJUSTED FOR THE SHEER AMOUNT OF DATA THAT THESE DISPLAYS TAKE IN AND THE INTELLIGENCE BEING TRANSMITTED.

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Figure 1 | The CP Tech TFX 3 is a rugged military-grade, high-performance 2U rackmount LCD display. Photo courtesy of CP Tech.

damage from blunt force and equipped with EMI shielding. Displays like this retain the ability to survive and function in an extreme military environment where a commercialgrade product would fail and cease to be useful.

“When we think rugged, we think it must survive environmental requirements, and it must be supportable over the life cycle of a military program,” says Jason Wade, president of ZMicro (San Diego, California). “All of this while using an LCD that was initially designed for a commercial application.” www.mil-embedded.com

Smaller and faster Going beyond the physical demands of a rugged display, there are size and weight restrictions that these displays are expected to meet in their ruggedization, as well. Whether now or further down the road, the baseline model for a rugged display will become easier to update and modify to accommodate trends in the market and needs of the user.

“The need for size, weight, and power (SWaP) and even customization,” says Ross Hudman, sales and marketing manager at Digital Systems Engineering (Scottsdale, Arizona). “That always seems to be a driving force for us, especially in the ground mobile market. Customers are really looking for something that does more in a smaller package.”

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Mil Tech Trends

RUGGED COMPUTING & THERMAL MANAGEMENT

Less seems to be more in the rugged display market, as space is at a premium for many uses. To cut down on computer and display sprawl, one solution may be dumb displays.

“A dumb display is going to be smaller; it’s going to take up less room, and it’s going to be cost effective,” Kothari says. “What Systel does is create an all-in-one line-replaceable unit (LRU) mission computer that handles all the sensor ingest, all the networking, and then connects to a variety of displays onboard the vehicle. And because you’re doing all the computing in a single box, your displays can then be dumb displays.” (Figure 2.)

Military-use displays must be smaller, but they also must be more powerful. While consumer-technology capabilities are being adopted and implemented in the display’s design, those concepts need to be adjusted for the sheer amount of data that these displays take in and the intelligence being transmitted.

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“Being able to provide a lot of data simultaneously is essential to the user,” McCormack says. “And whether you’re using it on a ground control station flying a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle], or in a weapons platform on a Navy ship, you’re going to have multiple inputs that you’re going to need to display simultaneously so that you can react faster.

So it’s more information, faster reaction times, and the ability to manage multiple applications simultaneously.”

Modifications and customizations A baseline rugged display design for a manufacturer to use as a reference makes it easier to modify and customize the product to meet the operator’s needs, which often vary. Qualified intellectual property, or reusable design elements, acts as the skeleton for designers to add to as technology progresses or modifications are requested.

“The LCD display itself and all of the backlighting and rugged optical treatments that go on that display are proven elements that can be reused. The power supply is reusable, the video processing piece is reusable, the network communication piece is reusable,” says Steve Motter, vice president of business development at IEE, Inc. (Van Nuys, California). “The customization process is really integrating these proven elements that already exist and working within our customer’s installation size constraints and adding the display-bezel labeling and the number of buttons they are looking for.”

IEE’s Multi-Function Display (Figure 3) has customizable features like programmable joystick and customizable bezels. Offering these modification opportunities result in minimal development costs, which is ideal for the customer as they are not typically funded, nor have the time, to build displays from scratch.

“Maintaining the same form, fit, and function is the goal for any military display designer,” ZMicro’s Wade says. “It offers a seamless transition from older to newer technology for the user.”

Standards and regulations While modifications are often made to rugged displays to meet the unique needs of the operator, there are a specific set of regulations and military standards that these products must meet. These rugged display design requirements differ between the specifications of the user.

“If you’re in an aircraft, you have much more sensitive electronics so mlectromagnetic interference (EMI) becomes critical to shield your system for that,” Kothari says. “On the naval side, depending on what the platform is, you’d have to consider salt spray, submersion, acoustic noise … if you’re on a helicopter you have to consider shock and vibration.”

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Figure 2 | Systel’s dumb displays are powered by a single LRU. Photo courtesy of Systel.

Figure 3 | IEE’s 10.1-inch Multi-Function Display features a programmable 8-way joystick and 13 programmable bezel pushbuttons.

Understanding those user groups’ requirements from an environmental and rugged design perspective is critical.

This is where military standards come into play, MIL-STD-810G being the most prevalent. MIL-STD-810G is a test plan that subjects military gear, including rugged displays, to conditions that it will experience throughout its time in a military program. This could include shock, sand and dust exposure, gunfire vibration, and more.

The Digital Systems Engineering High Definition Rugged Monitor series (Figure 4) is among many other military displays that get put through their paces during testing to earn its military-standard compliance. Without it, a respectable mean time between failures on the battlefield would be impossible to attain.

“Manufacturers are trying to design a product that is encompassing and meets the requirements of all of those branches,” www.mil-embedded.com

Rollable, foldable, and wearable displays are also expected to hit the military market in the near future. These capabilities will drastically aid in launching the design of rugged displays to eventually support virtual and augmented reality. “The future does continue to evolve toward that flexible, wearable display,” Motter says. “In addition, the idea of virtual reality where the operator is wearing the display in an immersive environment is a huge area of development and investment in the display industry.”

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Figure 4 | Digital Systems Engineering’s 1080p Full High Definition Rugged Monitor series is MIL-STD-461, 704, 810, 1275-compliant.

Hudman says. “There are commonality requirements in terms of shock and vibration and environmental factors.”

Other military standards that rugged displays often have to meet are MIL-STD-461, which details EMI requirements, and MIL-S-901D that simulates explosions in the water near ships and submarines.

These standards are not limiting to the design of a rugged display, however, because they are simply vital to the display’s lifespan.

The future of rugged, smart displays The military technology industry will always have a slow-moving nature, but that isn’t to say there aren’t exciting advancements on the horizon for rugged military displays. When 4K technology hit the commercial market about five years ago, most aged military programs weren’t written to support 4K resolution.

However, newer programs written around five years ago now have the capabilities to support 4K and design it into a display’s software. This reveals a multitude of opportunities for the functionality of rugged military displays, one of which is ZMicro’s Orion 32 display that incorporates virtual window technology. (See lead photo, page 18) “We have a capability in our displays’ technology that we call Virtual Windows,” Wade says. “This enables users – particularly those who might be working with a lower-resolution software platform – to be able to consolidate multiple video feeds onto a common 4K screen without losing any resolution.” www.mil-embedded.com

Then comes the advent of artificial intelligence that – while admittedly farther down the line than most technological advancements for displays – will result in higher pixel densities to pull more data out of a video stream. The goal is simply to maximize the amount of information that customers can get from these displays; in due time, these capabilities will be just a touch away. MES

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Mil Tech Trends RUGGED COMPUTING & THERMAL MANAGEMENT

Cool world: A tour of thermalmanagement approaches for rugged computer systems

By Jason Shields What happens when a CPU gets too hot? Circuitry within the device runs slower, which can lead to poor system performance. The design of rugged mission-critical computer systems must consider thermal management as a system-level issue.

There are usually two levels of protection built into the chip to protect it from overheating. The first is a critical shutdown which, when triggered, will shut down the whole device to prevent physical damage. The second is throttling, where the processor’s clock is simply slowed down. Throttling, which is supported by Intel processors, typically occurs at a lower temperature threshold than shutdown.

For example, Intel core processors automatically throttle their performance based on the processor workload and their thermal environment. In theory, this is a good approach for cooling down a system that heats up after using increased amounts of power. In a mission-critical environment, however, a throttled processor is not desirable. For defense applications, such as electronic warfare (EW) and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), where consistent, deterministic performance is required, processor throttling can adversely affect mission success.

cool operating range. Rugged military computers are different, however: The harsh conditions encountered by military platforms in the air, on the ground, or at sea preclude the use of many traditional cooling methods or require substantial changes and/or limitations.

Processor throttling (also sometimes called dynamic frequency scaling) is used in computer architectures to adjust the clock frequency, or instructions executed per unit of time, of a processor. Throttling back the clock frequency causes a processor to run more slowly, do less work, use less power, and as a consequence generate less heat.

As the device’s operating clock gracefully slows down, the temperature goes down, preventing timing errors.

For example, typical cooling fans work by exchanging the air inside the computer with the cooler, ambient air on the outside. But what if that ambient air is full of dust, humidity, salt fog, or smoke?

All of these conditions are potentially harmful if introduced into the system.

Consider missions that must operate in low-pressure zones (higher altitudes).

Sometimes at higher altitudes there will not be enough air available to transfer heat sufficiently.

Keeping your cool Thermal management for traditional servers, desktops, or laptops is fairly straightforward. Typically, system designers can come up with a combination of fans, heat sinks, heat pipe coolers, and other components that keep systems within a relatively

Each design challenge must consider the entire system, with components and solutions selected to best meet the requirements of the finished product.

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www.mil-embedded.com

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Figure 1 | A conduction-cooled chassis transfers heat from the chips to the lowertemperature cold plate.

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Figure 2 | AFT technology uses a heat-exchanger frame.

cold wall, it is important to minimize the thermal resistance of this path, which can be done by using materials with low thermal resistance and wedge locks with higher clamping force.

For rugged applications, several thermal management techniques are often required to protect a system’s internal components.

Conduction cooling Conduction cooling is defined as the transfer of heat through solids.

A common example is a conductioncooled chassis mounted onto a cold plate (Figure 1). Heat generated inside the chassis by the electronics flows into the aluminum sidewalls of the chassis and down into the cold plate. Since heat energy wants to move from the source to another medium that’s cooler, the heat is transferred from the chips to the lower-temperature cold plate.

At the board level, conduction cooling is done by transferring heat from the components through a conduction frame to the card edge and to the “cold wall” of the chassis. To maximize the heat transfer from the components to the www.mil-embedded.com

For many years, conduction cooling has been the mainstay of thermal management for rugged systems. Although it still plays a major role, there are limits to how much heat conduction cooling by itself can dissipate. Most traditional conduction-cooling methods are unable to disperse the heat generated by today’s hotter cards: Where once it was commonplace to have 50-watt cards, 120-watt to 200-watt cards are becoming more common.

Convection (air) cooling Convection cooling uses airflow to transfer heat from a card into the ambient air. With this approach, the air must stay significantly cooler than the card for this approach to work effectively, because air is a poor coolant with low heat capacity. There are two basic types of convection cooling: one that relies on natural airflow and one that requires forced airflow via fans. At the board level, care needs to be taken to ensure that devices further downstream are cooled adequately. Air temperature will rise as it passes over the card, with the result that downstream devices are being cooled with hotter air.

Air-flow-through cooling As cards require increasing amounts of power, traditional conductive or convective cooling methods become less viable. That’s where air-flow-through (AFT) cooling comes in. AFT technology uses a heat-exchanger frame, which prevents the cooling air from coming in contact with the electronics. On both the inlet and the exhaust sides of the card, a gasket mounted inside the chassis seals the card’s internal air passage to the chassis side walls (Figure 2). These seals prevent air from being blown into the chassis and protect the internal electronics from the harsh external environment.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

July/August 2019 23

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Mil Tech Trends

RUGGED COMPUTING & THERMAL MANAGEMENT

For systems requiring high power densities, AFT cooling is one of the most reliable active cooling solutions. By providing a thermal path of low resistance, an AFT-cooled chassis can deliver cooling capacity of as much as 200 watts per slot, environmental sealing to accommodate the harshest environments, and cooling without exotic materials or fluids associated with liquid or evaporative cooling.

One of the benefits of AFT is that the cooling air is brought in very close proximity to the high-power components on both the base card and mezzanine cards, providing a direct path to the cooling ambient air. Since the air does not come in direct contact with the components, “dirty” air can be used.

Moreover, instead of cards having to share cooling air or share the thermal interface into which they conduct heat, each AFT card has its own inlet and its own exhaust.

There is no other cooling path assumed, aside from the cooling air (although in reality

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Figure 3 | Liquid-flow-through cooling uses inlet and outlet quick disconnect liquid connectors with a pump at the chassis/system level.

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Figure 4 | In the fluid-flow-through (FFT) system, the fluid can be either liquid or air.

there is a parallel conduction path). This setup enables every card to be viewed in isolation from a thermal standpoint. The critical aspect at the system level is to ensure balanced airflow through all of the cards, so that each card has the required amount of cooling air to keep components at their appropriate temperature.

Given the benefits of AFT in simplicity of design, weight efficiency, and low thermal resistance, AFT cooling technology is ideal for high-power applications such as sensor processing.

Liquid-flow-through cooling For cards with power densities above 200 watts, a different cooling approach is necessary, as air isn’t the most efficient medium for transferring heat. That’s where liquid-flow-through (LFT) cooling comes in. While similar to AFT in some respects, LFT uses a liquid cooling frame (Figure 3) that employs inlet and outlet quick disconnect (QD) liquid connectors,

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MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

www.mil-embedded.com

with a liquid pump used at the chassis/ system level. While this may add some weight, pumps require less power to operate than fans.

The cooling capacities of LFT are enhanced. For example, a common fluid used in LFT systems is polyalphaolefin (PAO) oil, which conducts heat five times more efficiently than air. This means that LFT-based systems can theoretically cool cards up to 1,000 watts. As processing devices continue to increase in power consumption, LFT may be required to maximize the usefulness of these devices.

Fluid-flow-through cooling Curtiss-Wright has patented a system known as fluid-flow-through (FFT) cooling (Figure 4). In this case, the fluid can be either liquid or air. The main difference is that FFT uses fixed channels (air-cooled or liquid-cooled) that are built into the chassis. In addition, it uses conduction-cooled modules –

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Table 1 | Rugged high-power cooling approaches.

conduction frames attached to printed wiring boards (PWB). FFT enables high net airflow volume, since no sealing is required, and supports the use of standard conduction cards.

A variety of thermal-management solutions exist (Table 1), each with varying suitability for different power levels. When designing a rugged computer system, it’s important to consider thermal management as a system-level issue, because focusing on thermal management at the card level fails to consider how all the modules installed together in a semi-closed system might affect each other. MES Jason Shields is Acting Manager of the Advanced Systems Group at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions. He has been with C-W for nearly 12 years, during which he has led engineering and product teams.

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Mil Tech Trends RUGGED COMPUTING & THERMAL MANAGEMENT

Enabling SWaP-optimized EW solutions through accurate FPGA power modeling

By Mario LaMarche

Modern electronic warfare (EW) systems, especially those for use in harsh SWaP-constrained environments, must not only include high-performance processing elements, but also the technology to cool these high-power devices. These challenges are particularly relevant in the design of compact FPGA [field-programmable gate array] modules that are at the core of next-generation systems. In order to stay ahead of adversaries and ensure control of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS), it is critical to leverage the latest device technology. However, each generation of new FPGA devices comes with higher processing density, which brings more thermal-management challenges.

Historically, the advancements in FPGA technology have supported each new generation of high-performance electronic warfare (EW) system. However, in the last few years thermal management is emerging as the new limiting factor in FPGA performance. While modern FPGA devices have the size and speed to support processing-intensive EW and spectrum-management algorithms, they are unusable if the system fails to manage the heat generated by the devices.

Additionally, since the power usage depends on the specific algorithm installed on the FPGA, it is possible that this limitation is not discovered until the FPGA module is integrated into the customer’s next higher assembly. (Figure 1.)

The consequences of poor FPGA thermal management are often severe. For

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borderline cases, the mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) is reduced, increasing the likelihood of the module failing in the field. For more severe cases, the FPGA module simply will be unable to handle an intensive algorithm. Additionally, poor power modeling can lead to a power supply that is unable to provide sufficient current to the FPGA devices.

In order to develop effective and efficient thermal management hardware, as well as properly size the FPGA power supplies, it is critical to build an accurate power model for the FPGA devices. Since the power usage is dependent on the specific algorithm, this model must be tailored for specific applications. Additionally, in order to support design optimization, this model must allow for parameter sweeping.

Traditional FPGA power modeling Standard design methodology uses the power model provided by the FPGA device manufacturer. However, in order to yield an accurate result, these models require detailed inputs that are not always known to the FPGA module designer. In order to deal with the lack of power modeling accuracy, the designer typically has two options.

The first option is to overengineer the power supply and cooling systems. Using the most conservative analysis, the designer can select a power supply that far exceeds the expected current draw of the devices. Additionally, increasing the physical size of the module and including extra thermal conduction pathways will enable

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The second option is to perform multiple design iterations. In the first iteration the designer uses their best guesses for the size of the power supply and cooling architecture. After a prototype is built, the power is measured and a second iteration is designed to account for the actual levels. While also resulting in a product that meets the power specifications, this approach delays the schedule and increases the design cost. Additionally, in order for this approach to be successful, the FPGA module designer must have detailed knowledge of the specific end-users’ algorithm. Without an accurate representation of the algorithm, the FPGA module designer is unable to measure the actual power used by the prototype.

Another approach to FPGA power modeling One approach to addressing these challenges is to divide the modeling process into different phases based on the stage of the design. With this approach, an early power prediction at the beginning of the development process provides the designer with

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the module to handle the power dissipation – even if the actual power levels vary from the rough model. While this approach will likely yield a product that meets the power specifications, it will be larger and more expensive than needed.

Since most systems are limited in size, weight, and cost, an overengineered solution will likely present problems.

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Mil Tech Trends

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the information for the power supply design as well as the mechanical cooling elements. Using the results of this early power prediction modeling, a prototype is built.

After fabrication, the power is measured by installing validation IP – designed to realistically emulate customer algorithms – into the FPGA devices. The results of this testing are fed back into the model and used to improve the accuracy for future designs.

Implementation of the early power-prediction modeling In order to apply the results of one modeling activity to a subsequent design, the early power-prediction tool must simplify the process of entering the various parameters into the model supplied by the FPGA device manufacturer. However, accuracy must not be sacrificed for the sake of efficiency. To balance these, the designer takes the power model as provided by the FPGA device manufacturer and adds automation to generate the various inputs. Separating the FPGA logic into groups based on function simplifies the process of defining the inputs to the model. (Figure 2.)

Additionally, this approach benefits from a common architecture across multiple FPGA module designs, including a consistent but scalable control-plane infrastructure, proven data-plane infrastructure (interfaces, framers, and switches), and standard clocking and synchronization IP. The FPGA design blocks are partitioned based on their properties, such as sample data, sample processing, stream data, control plane, stream interfaces, and the like. By reusing this proven infrastructure and modeling design blocks according to their respective properties, the model accuracy is improved with each new design.

Since this approach uses automation to populate the manufacturer’s model, it enables rapid design automation through parameter sweeping. Additionally, it allows the user to optimize a model to converge on measured data in order to improve the accuracy of the inputs to the model for future designs.

Design validation As previously mentioned, both modeling the FPGA power usage and validating the hardware requires a deep understanding of the customer algorithm. Since different applications vary in complexity and result in different bit-toggle rates, the power validation is specific to individual use cases. To achieve this flexibility, Mercury has developed the EchoCore Power Load IP, which enables more precise control of FPGA resource utilization.

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The tool enables the user to compare and correlate the power modeling predictions with the empirical measurements, which helps refine the assumptions used as inputs to the model, thereby improving the accuracy of the power model for future FPGA designs. Validation of production hardware can also be performed prior to shipping to the end user, with this step reducing the likelihood of integration issues and failures in the field.

Managing heat going forward As rival nations leverage readily available commercial technology to deploy advanced EW capabilities, maintaining control of the EMS necessitates the rapid and efficient development of new, highperformance systems that are optimized for SWaP-constrained environments.

In order to ensure reliable operation, all phases of the design must incorporate accurate thermal modeling. These models must be accurate, flexible, and have the efficiency to support parameter sweeping. Additionally, these models must leverage a process to validate the hardware and correlate the empirical data to the modeled results. Since the actual power dissipation is dependent on the algorithm, this process must have the flexibility to be adjusted to represent multiple different applications.

Optimizing the power handling and understanding the design tradeoffs are critical to program success and requires a supplier with a high degree of technical understanding as well as the ability to effectively collaborate with the end user to solve the most difficult thermalmanagement and other challenges. MES Mario LaMarche is product marketing manager for Mercury Systems. He previously worked at Teledyne Microwave Solutions and Samtec as product line manager and engineer. Mario holds MS and BS degrees in electrical engineering/RF and microwave design. Readers may reach Mario at mario.lamarche@mrcy.com.

Figure 2 | Modeling divides FPGA in functional blocks.

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Mil Tech Trends RUGGED COMPUTING & THERMAL MANAGEMENT

Conductioncooling advancements complement ultracompact servers in battle versus excessive heat

By Chris A. Ciufo Servers in the defense arena are packing ever-more electronics, posing serious thermal-management challenges. Advancements in conduction cooling, however, can reduce heat and prevent throttling in these small-form-factor designs.

Battles are fought in the real world and with modern electronic warfare systems; the battle is also “fought” internally in systems against heat and its effects on electronics.

This situation is especially true in rugged battlefield servers, which mandate high mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) compared to commercial data center equipment.

Battlefield servers routinely experience extreme heat in deployed environments like the Middle East, Africa, and even Arizona.

As these high-performance battlefield servers become true mobile data centers with Intel’s latest scalable Xeon processors, it’s become even more challenging to remove the heat. In vehicles, on ships, on wide-body aircraft, and within quasi-fixed, behindfront-lines operation centers, heat can be a true server killer, throttling performance and putting lives at risk.

Removing or at least reducing heat from battlefield servers can be done in multiple ways, from blown air to liquid or conduction cooling. While versions of these approaches – or a combination of the three – have been around for decades, new enhancements offer more innovative conduction-cooled hybrid-style alternatives for servers on the scorching battlefield.

Air cooling by convection Rackmount server system designers operating in places like command tents often try to use the same cooling techniques as those used in enterprise installations.

Unfortunately, air-cooling (via convection) with fans and pure commercial-temperature components isn’t nearly as effective on the battlefield.

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Internal design inefficiencies reduce air flow, requiring more air per square inch fed into the server. Individual component heat sinks each indiscriminately heat the air while simultaneously slowing the air’s velocity due to eddies, obstructions, and dust buildup. Upstream components can also inadvertently overheat downstream components. The answer is more air, and air-conditioned (cold) air needs to be fed into the server.

Battlefield “chillers” that cool the server inlet air work well but require some heavyweight logistics. The chiller units can be truck-mounted to cool both the operators and the servers – say, in a command post tent – or rackmounted to cool just the servers. Either way, mammoth generators are also needed to power the chillers. The generators need fuel and are noisy, complicating a force’s deployment logistics and stealth. All this to cool a rackmount server. www.mil-embedded.com

liquid, and/or conduction cooling. The hybrid approach can be more efficient and reliable in removing heat as designers try to fit as much power as possible into increasingly smaller rackmount systems that are not very deep and only 1U or 2U high.

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Figure 1 | A typical rackmount server is densely packed with impediments to airflow and places for particles like dust and smoke to collect.

The fans used in pure convection-cooled servers are also loud, prone to failure, and transport airborne particles from outside the server chassis to the inside (Figure 1). A 1U server is only 1.75 inches tall yet must dissipate as much as 1.5 KW out the exhaust ports, equivalent to the heat of a hair dryer. Accordingly, the server’s small fans scream at high RPM to move the air, forcing operators near the server to wear ear protection.

And if servers are used on the battlefield – in trucks, tents, or in an aircraft parked in a humid environment – the fans also deposit dust, dirt, talc, smoke, and even mold spores and corrosive airborne salt into the cramped chassis. As debris builds up, cooling performance goes down and heat increases. Bad news on the battlefield.

COULD BENEFIT FROM A HYBRID APPROACH COMPOSED OF SOME FORM OF AIR, LIQUID, AND/OR CONDUCTION COOLING.

Advances in conduction cooling solve the challenges The most effective hybrid approach uses new-to-servers conduction-cooling techniques that conduct heat away from hot spots in the server to a central “radiator” core plenum that’s essentially a whole-system cooling plate. This method efficiently moves heat from all components at once and replaces processors’ heat sinks in three dimensions (up, across laterally, and out), and then exhausts hot air through the back of the system. The conduction-cooled approach is not unlike that of an air-cooled server, but air moves only through the large central plenum into which all the system’s heat is conducted. This approach differs from the use of individual heat sinks, in which every component is attached to a whole-system heat sink through or across which air or liquid moves. Typically, air is the preferred fluid for the reasons mentioned above.

A hybrid conduction-cooled system connects all hot spots with conduction plates, allowing heat to move through the cold plates from hot areas to cooler areas. Heat is then removed from the metal surfaces and dispersed in the ambient air at the system level. The primary difference is that the air or liquid is cooling not individual components

A case for liquid cooling?

Liquid cooling, in contrast, uses toxic (glycol-based), corrosive (salts), or inert liquids to move large amounts of heat through small pipes, card clamps, and hose connectors. As well, flammable liquids with high vapor pressure (such as alcohol) cool well and are low-cost – but a leak can be catastrophic.

While liquid cooling is used increasingly in radar, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence to cool exceptionally highheat sensors and specialty electronics like transmitters and emitters, this approach has traditionally been very expensive, can be unreliable, and adds complex plumbing that doesn’t fit with small-form factor or low-profile systems like servers.

Moreover, liquid cooling isn’t passive; it requires a pump to move the fluid plus a liquid-to-air exchanger with a fan, adding yet another potential failure point.

The latest deployed rugged server installations could benefit from a hybrid approach composed of some form of air, www.mil-embedded.com

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Mil Tech Trends and hot spots, but an entire cold-plate assembly for the whole system.

Every component, board, or subsystem is conductively cooled using the coldplate mechanism, with heat conducted away from each component’s or subsystem’s heat sinks to the whole system’s combined heat sink assembly.

The benefits of the hybrid conductioncooled server method are many: › Carries out thermal management in multiple dimensions from top to bottom in the server design. › Directly moves heat from highwattage components like processors, GPUs, FPGAs, and specialty devices. › Moves heat to a single, large central core plenum for air-toconduction transfer. › Optimizes the blown air and is less likely to clog than individual heat sink fins.

RUGGED COMPUTING & THERMAL MANAGEMENT

› Allows for a sealed system where only the central plenum is open to the environment, minimizing dust and moisture ingress and accentuating EMI mitigation.

small-form-factor systems for nearly 20 years (Figure 2). It works equally well in rackmount servers.

Moving heat from components to cold plates The hybrid conduction-cooled server works because heat sinks – essentially one continuous heat sink – are applied to all components, regardless of their location in the airflow. Heat is conducted through the system’s internal heat plate to the central air-to-conduction plenum.

Unlike other cooling systems, which can’t conduct heat as efficiently and might have as much as 25 °C of temperature rise from the component to the cold plate, this way of cooling can lower the temperature delta to less than 10 °C from the CPU core to the cold plate.

The less of a thermal “resistor” there is, the cooler the CPU will run without the thermal throttling that slows the CPU down to avoid damage from excess heat.

The approach uses a corrugated alloy slug with an extremely low thermal resistance that acts as a heat spreader at the processor die; and once the heat is spread over a larger area, a special compound in a sealed chamber transfers the heat from the spreader to the internal cold plate. This system from General Micro Systems, called RuggedCool, has been used in high-heat, high-wattage

Processors without throttling = reliable servers As stated above, using conduction cooling in rackmount servers enables components to operate at their maximum potential without throttling at higher temperatures. For example, the processor – whether a CPU, GPU, or FPGA – and an intelligent peripheral such as an Ethernet switch or a Thunderbolt 3

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ment – focused on conduction cooling moving heat directly to the server’s mounting cold plate and processors – can enable the servers to run cooler, be more reliable, and avoid throttling. Now even the scorching heat of the battlefield shouldn’t slow the performance of these powerful servers when computing resources matter most.

MES Chris A. Ciufo is chief technology officer and VP of product marketing at General Micro Systems, Inc. Ciufo is a veteran of the semiconductor, COTS, and defense industries, where he has held engineering, marketing, and executive-level positions. He has published more than 100 technology-related articles. He holds a bachelor’s degree in EE/materials science and participates in defense industry organizations and consortia.

General Micro Systems www.gms4sbc.com

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Figure 2 | A graphic view of how conduction cooling used in smallform-factor systems can work equally well in ultra-compact server designs.

The cold plate on the bottom is now mounted internally to the server.

Air is blown through the cold plate’s central air-to-conduction plenum (Image: General Micro Systems).

controller are typically the hottest parts of the system.

In other words, designers must ensure that servers operate below their maximum thermal design power (TDP) without any internal throttling of the processor or peripherals. Intel processors – designed not to exceed about 105 °C – start to throttle when they get close to their maximum temperature, a process that essentially puts the server into a “limp” mode. Here, the new conductioncooling techniques can play a vital role in keeping the processors and peripherals running at maximum performance without throttling by enabling servers using Intel-based CPUs with a TjMax of 105 °C to operate in military environments at full operational load without throttling the processor.

Powerful CPUs in compact chassis More innovative thermal management is becoming imperative for battlefield servers operating outside air-conditioned server rooms. Servers with fully sealed and conduction-cooled chassis can withstand the harsh rigors of the battlefield, have higher reliability and MTBF, and achieve superior EMI capability.

Applied to 19-inch rackmount servers, this hybrid approach to thermal managewww.mil-embedded.com

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Mil Tech Trends RUGGED COMPUTING & THERMAL MANAGEMENT

Thermal and rugged considerations for horizontal-mount chassis platforms

By Justin Moll and Jacques Houde Horizontal-mount enclosures can be effective solutions in military embedded systems, particularly for smaller systems with thermalmanagement challenges.

Embedded system designers who go right to a 19-inch rackmount chassis with the boards mounted vertically – even for a smaller system – are going to lose a lot of space. Solving this problem will also mean overcoming some thermal hurdles.

for four slots in the 2U height. Theoretically, even three cards can be stacked in line, having the boards go 9U across. This would allow for six boards in a 2U chassis, but the thermal requirements would have to be considered very carefully in this configuration.

If the backplane is only between two and six slots wide, then in a typical one-inch OpenVPX slot pitch there is likely 10 to 14 inches of mostly unutilized space.

With front-to-rear airflow, the chassis will typically be taller than needed. For example, it would be 5U-6U high to accommodate 3U boards or 8U-9U high for 6U boards.

Thermal management The horizontal-mount approach does bring some challenges in providing effective cooling. Side-to-side cooling is an effective approach, as the air can pass straight across the boards without bends. There can be one set of fans or a set on each side of the cards for a push-pull airflow configuration. See Figure 1 for an example of a push-pull cooling design.

By using a horizontal-mount approach, however, the chassis height can be greatly reduced: 6U designs can fit two slots in a 2U high chassis. When using 3U cards, they can be mounted side-by-side

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The horizontal-mount approach also easily facilitates a mix of 6U and 3U OpenVPX boards, with the boards set in line. Alternatively, a VITA 62 or other 3U PSU can be placed next to the 6U board.

Many applications don’t accommodate a side-to-side cooling airflow approach. In front-to-rear cooling, the airflow for a horizontal-mount system often has to make two 90-degree bends. While horizontal-mount enclosures have been around for a long time, it’s a little more challenging for OpenVPX due to the additional power/cooling and the architecture’s wider pitch (typically an inch) and the special spacing offset of the panels for the solder side of the circuit board. This configuration requires specially designed components for the architecture. For OpenVPX and other high-power systems, proper chassis cooling can be a challenge. (Figure 2.)

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

www.mil-embedded.com

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Figure 1 | Example of a push-pull airflow configuration with fans on each side of the card cage in a horizontal-mount chassis.

Figure 3 | To achieve high-wattage cooling in this 2U OpenVPX chassis, an airway path goes through cutouts in the backplane. One plug-in module is inverted (making the two boards face-to-face) to optimize airflow over the hottest components.

of the enclosure, then pulled across the boards, typically a very efficient cooling approach.

But what do you do if the boards need to be in the rear of the chassis? It’s less common, but sometimes the user will want the cards in the back so that the cables can reside in the rear of the chassis without a complex (and expensive) cabling approach.

To overcome this design challenge, the air can be pushed from the front to the rear.

In the example in Figure 3, the requirement was that the boards be mounted in the rear of the chassis so that the cabling would be in the back of the rack. Most racks are set up to have the cool air come from the front of the unit and the heat exhaust to go to the back of the rack. Therefore, the 2U horizontal OpenVPX chassis had boards mounted in the rear with the air pushed directly from the front to the back.

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Figure 2 | Front-to-rear airflow can also be achieved in a horizontal-mount chassis. However, the cooling typically takes a fine-tuned approach for higher wattage systems.

When the airflow needs to bend around corners, the chassis designers can employ air baffles or angle the airflow feeds. This approach can lessen the bends, providing a more efficient path.

Thermal simulation can be performed to find hot spots and adjustments can be made to optimize the cooling. Figure 2 shows the air intake on the front side www.mil-embedded.com

In this particular case, the designer and the user had control over the front panels of the plug-in cards, which is not always the case, as third-party commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) boards are sourced. The designers were able to take advantage of the frontpanel area by adding holes for air exhaust, which also enabled more precise airflow control. With the use of thermal simulation, carefully designed holes in the backplane provided a pathway for the air to go between the boards. The design of the backplane/chassis had the top board oriented to be plugged in upside down, ensuring that the airflow flowed through the hottest area of the boards.

With the boards in the rear of the chassis, there was also inherent mechanical protection for the cabling. There was not anything in the front of the chassis for someone to bump, bend, or break.

However, this airflow approach is less common. How can a designer overcome the mechanical challenge in a typical front-to-rear or side-to-side cooling approach?

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RUGGED COMPUTING & THERMAL MANAGEMENT

Mechanical protection Protecting the front boards in a system in a common concern. The design of the OpenVPX handle solution keeps the boards fairly well protected, but when there is a lot of RF or other cabling, the cabling is prone to get bumped or snagged. The design could specify a full MIL-grade chassis, but this greatly increases the expense of the chassis.

Another solution is to recess the boards inside the chassis. The front cover of the enclosure provides the mechanical protection, while the boards and cables are safe inside. The handles for MicroTCA protrude out a couple of centimeters, so it’s best to protect the boards and cabling inside the enclosure. The cabling can be routed under the card cage to the rear of the chassis. In a front-to-rear-cooled chassis, an air intake area can be placed on the front panel along with any customized I/O. With standard sheet-metal thickness and commercial grade fans and power, this approach is

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more cost-effective than a full military system while still providing enhanced protection. Of course, a similar approach can be employed for OpenVPX or other architectures.

Ruggedized design Ruggedizing the horizontal chassis can be achieved at various levels: militarygrade fans, air, and power filtering, plus military 38999 I/O connectors as required for full MIL-461 EMI, and MIL 810 and 901D for shock/vibration/ environmental requirements. Some applications require a hybrid approach, where the chassis needs to meet lower shock requirements, without all of the extremes in temperature, environment, etc. In these cases it’s possible to use thicker extrusions and sidewalls, extra screw/assembly points, a ruggedized PSU, and the like and still meet the application needs. Dampeners, spot welding, and isolators can be employed to provide additional rigidity.

Versatility for horizontal-mount chassis platforms Horizontal-mount chassis platforms are ideal for small to medium systems where rack space is at a premium. There are a wide range of options a designer can choose for front-to-rear or side-to-side cooling, mechanical protection, ruggedization, etc. As the wattage levels vary greatly in each application, it’s important to work with the chassis designer to factor in a proper cooling solution. The cooling needs to be balanced with the power requirements, space for cabling or RTMs [rear transition modules], physical space limitations/constraints, ruggedization level, and so on. No matter which configuration is chosen, a horizontalmount system can provide a powerful solution in a compact space. MES Justin Moll is VP, U.S. Market Development for Pixus Technologies.

He previously served as Director of Marketing for VadaTech and Director of Marketing for ELMA Bustronic.

Jacques Houde is Principal Design Architect for Pixus Technologies.

Pixus Technologies www.pixustechnologies.com www.mil-embedded.com

Industry Spotlight LEVERAGING BIG DATA FOR MILITARY APPLICATIONS

The big data battlefield

By Richard Whaley Market-intelligence firm IDC predicts that the sum of the world’s collective data, estimated at 33 zettabytes currently, will eclipse 175 zettabytes by 2025. That’s equivalent to forty billion pounds of common one-terabyte storage disks. Intelligence and military applications rely on massive data pipelines to drive intelligence gathering and mission-critical decisionmaking. The speed at which the warfighter is able to collect, process, analyze, and understand data directly impacts mission success.

What is big data?

“Big data” refers to large datasets so complex that transforming them into useful information cannot be achieved by traditional means. The challenges of big data break down into five fundamental areas – volume, variety, velocity, veracity and value, also known as the five Vs. (Figure 1.)

1. Volume: Datasets are often massive. Storing and moving this data without inundating existing IT infrastructure becomes a challenge without the proper hardware. Volumes of data are growing exponentially, necessitating scalable solutions.

2. Velocity: Analysis is most useful when it’s timely, driving real-time critical thinking and decisions.

Important factors that can hamper data processing include insufficient bandwidth, improper communications infrastructure, weather, and outdated hardware.

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3. Variety: Data comes from a variety of sources and arrives in both structured and unstructured forms. Unstructured data – such as surveillance imagery, sensor readings, and human-generated content – is the most challenging to analyze.

Without the proper software tools and analysis techniques, critical information may never surface from the chaotic mix of collected data.

4. Veracity: Collected data must be clean and accurate. The hardware that safeguards data contributes to veracity by ensuring all data is reliably and securely stored. Information warfare (IW) and cyberattacks represent growing threats to veracity because they pose the risk of lost or altered mission-critical data.

5. Value: The most important of the 5 Vs. Data is useless unless you can gain insight into its value. For example, users cannot deploy resources or make key operational decisions without understanding the risks, costs, and benefits to the mission.

Managing all the data Data management (DM) has become one of the key drivers in IW. Year after year, the U.S. military faces increased operational commitments and budget constraints, thereby forcing it to do more with fewer resources. The adaptability of the Department of Defense (DoD) has been a critical part of its ability to make rapid and intelligent strategic decisions. Data analytics has been a key enabler to this increased adaptability.

The 9/11 attacks changed our world in almost every aspect, including the future of how data would be stored and managed. Sept. 11, 2001 confirmed the need for military and intelligence communities to expand their use of data and analysis tool sets in order to protect the public from terrorist threats. Drawing timely insights from big data and understanding its challenges quickly became paramount to strengthening national security.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

www.mil-embedded.com

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Figure 1 | The five fundamentals of big data drive analysis, results, and decision-making at the tactical edge whether on land, at sea, or in the air.

What is the tactical edge?

U.S. warfighters operate in a more technologically augmented arena since 2001, where sensors, wearable computers, Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems all contribute to mission success. These devices produce enormous amounts of data (volume) stored in varying formats (variety) that must be transmitted rapidly (velocity) and reliably (veracity) into downstream systems to drive critical decisions (value).

Today’s warfighter often operates in remote, environmentally hostile, and actively contested regions. Distanced from normal IT infrastructure, their situation necessitates processing big data on-site – or at the “tactical edge.” Tactical edge devices can be found on drones, aircraft, land vehicles, and maritime vessels. On these platforms, hardware constraints such as size, weight, and power (SWaP) and extreme environmental conditions must be considered. To optimize space, edge-computing platforms strive to pack the latest processing, memory, storage, and I/O features into compact form factors without compromising reliability. To survive harsh environmental exposure, edge devices are subjected to stringent testing standards such as MIL-STD-810, MIL-STD-167, and MIL-STD-901, among others. Deploying a reliable processing solution with a failure rate closest to zero is critical to ensuring mission success.

A warfighter’s daily operations are increasingly dependent on analyzing data quickly to make critical decisions and respond to potential threats. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has developed an informational architecture – known as the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) v2.0 – aimed at modernizing the warfighter and their infrastructure by providing guidelines on collecting, analyzing, and categorizing data.

AI applications rely on vast stores of data and computing resources. Supporting such capabilities at the tactical edge requires “built-to-purpose” hardware that fulfills SWaP requirements, can manage the five V demands of big data, and can handle device interoperability. Deployed hardware must also provide configurability and scalability for future deployments while leveraging the latest in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. COTS technologies are central to powering such AI elements as general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), which aggregate many compute cores on a hefty PCIe adapter module. This deep-learning format enables the simultaneous processing of massive datasets, delivering the extreme parallelism and bandwidth AI applications demand.

Combining these technologies can pose their own challenges, however: Electronic components such as GPGPUs are complex and delicate, meaning that successfully integrating them into military systems requires special attention to system design, where understanding the warfighter’s operating environment, the associated thermal dynamics, and necessary system ruggedization are crucial. www.mil-embedded.com

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Figure 2 | Mercury Systems’ EnterpriseSeries servers are currently deployed on numerous airborne, naval, and land platforms to handle computing at the tactical edge.

In 2018, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a $2 billion investment in accelerating AI integration into U.S. warfare platforms.

AI-enabled military systems are smarter because they can extract insights from big data, which both enhances system autonomy and reduces reliance on errorprone human input. The ability to effectively process “big” combat data at the tactical edge can support new autonomous capabilities that identify threats, predict enemy behavior, optimize logistics, and protect military networks from cyberattacks. (Figure 2.)

Moving forward with big data Modern warfare on the big data battlefield relies on insights extracted from ever-growing volumes of unstructured, time-critical data. The processing systems that support big data and AI applications must fulfill unique computing requirements while ensuring reliability at the tactical edge and must also guarantee veracity by building security into hardware as opposed to simply bolting it on.

MES Richard Whaley is Director of Systems Engineering, Trusted Mission Solutions, at Mercury Systems.

Mercury Systems www.mrcy.com

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

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EXECUTIVE SPEAKOUT

Thinking Outside the Box: CP Technologies Expands into Full Rack Integration

By Mike McCormack, President of CP Technologies We have been designing and manufacturing computers, servers, LCD displays, storage arrays, and human interface devices for the defense industry for over 20 years. In that time, while we have created some of the most advanced and agile computing systems on the market, we have also noticed an unrealized opportunity. CP Technologies is now expanding to offer hardware integration, including full racks and transit cases, in addition to continuing to offer individual components.

Previously, the Department of Defense (DoD) end user or Prime Contractor would specify the hardware vendor and then select an integrator to integrate the hardware and customer specified systems into a rack with specific structured cabling, slides and cable management.

We recognized that this added a layer

of cost, additional logistical costs, increased lead times, and enormous configuration issues as the integrator has to assure compatibility of hardware, configuration management, revision control and obsolescence management. With our new model, we estimate a 20% cost savings for DoD end users and Primes while decreasing lead times and improving overall compatibility.

With this expansion, we are excited to be able to provide complete solutions to our customers, partnering with them to meet 100% of their program requirements. These solutions can range from simple rack mounted servers to complete system integration including transit case and rack assembly.

CP Technologies is the first rugged computer and displays manufacturer to expand into integration, creating a new opportunity for the industry to reduce cost and lead times while improving compatibility. We will also be managing obsolescence and revision control to ensure long term support for the life of the program. Our Complete Rack Solutions are built to handle the harshest of operating environments, designed with Military Standards (Mil-Stds) in mind. With this new structure, DoD end users and Defense Primes will be able to deliver complete products faster and cheaper than before, with guaranteed compatibility. CP Technologies will be offering full customer systems with one part number with revision control of all sub-components. Systems will be loaded with a basic operating system and will provide complete documentation to support the system, including a full drawing package.

CP’s system solutions include Complete Rack Solutions, Medium Tactical Solutions in a Transit Case, our Small Tactical Computer System and our Portable Computer Solutions. These complete solutions provide the computer, LCD display, storage, keyboard, network switches, routers and power management devices including UPS and PDUs in a 19-inch rack, transit case or portable system. Learn more at: https://cp-techusa.com/crs/.

CP Technologies https://cp-techusa.com/crs/

ADVERTORIAL

EXECUTIVE SPEAKOUT

Bringing AI to Embedded Computing

By Jason Wade, President – ZMicro, Inc. Military embedded computing has always been about bringing intelligence to the edge. But the nature of that intelligence is about to change dramatically due to the rapid rise of embedded AI. Embedded AI is artificial intelligence capability that is deployed on a device or system such as a mission computer.

If I had to choose just one application that will be dramatically improved and probably completely transformed by embedded AI it would be ISR. Today, we are already collecting far more video data than can be fully exploited by human operators in real time or even with today’s post-mission processing technology. AI is capable of handling very large volumes of data far more efficiently and accurately than humans or conventional processing systems.

AI for Every Day Embedded AI has become pervasive in our daily lives. We regularly encounter it without giving it much thought. A smartphone automatically unlocks when it recognizes its owner’s face. If there is too much traffic on the way to work, we just ask Siri to open up Waze to find a better route. Advanced driver safety features like Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) and Lane Departure Warning kick in just when we need them to help avoid collisions. The underlying AI technologies like voice recognition, facial and object detection, computer vision, turn-by-turn navigation, and autonomous driving have been around in various forms for decades. We are now finally seeing a large variety of AI-based products in the marketplace due to the relatively recent availability of cost-effective AI-capable computer hardware. Certainly, the efforts of the automotive industry to deliver autonomous vehicles have accelerated the growth and commercial availability of embedded AI technologies.

Today, there is a proliferation of new AI accelerator chips and a choice of opensource AI development platforms such as TensorFlow. Conditions are now perfect for an explosion of new AI-enabled capabilities in deployed military systems.

AI for Every Mission It’s almost like we’ve been on a binge stockpiling data, especially ISR video in anticipation of the day we would eventually be able to fully exploit it. Essentially every mission collects ISR video. Cameras are deployed to capture as much imagery as possible, but the sheer volume of video can make it difficult to sift through to find meaningful new information. In many cases, a mission requires real-time information and is dependent upon human operators to glean important details on-the-fly. However, it is well known that human operators quickly become fatigued and are notoriously poor at wading through video streams to find specific objects or infrequent events. AI, onthe-other-hand, never gets tired and is capable of finding and tracking even difficult to spot or obscure objects, people, behaviors, or other changes in surveillance videos.

Additionally, AI could be used to enable the camera only when specific elements or circumstances of interest occur so only meaningful imagery is captured. This would significantly reduce storage requirements enabling much more efficient use of time, equipment, and space.

Given the rise of GPUs for AI applications, our strategy has focused on designing systems with a GPU-first perspective rather than a GPU add-on approach. This has allowed us to provide enterprise-class processing performance in a system less than half the size and weight of a comparable rackmount server implementation. For high-powered AI-enabled ISR applications, we leverage advanced CUDA capabilities through NVIDIA® Tesla® P100 support in our compact ZM3 Computer. For customers looking for an embedded solution, we’ve developed our Insight Video Processing platform, a dedicated real-time video enhancement system that incorporates the NVDIA Jetson TX2. Jetson TX2 is built around an NVIDIA Pascal-family GPU and enables high performance AI at the edge.

As a manufacturer of rugged computing solutions for military applications, our task is pretty clear: take advanced industry technology and figure out how to deploy this hardware to meet stringent military requirements. With the availability of COTS AI accelerators and open-source AI-development tools, suppliers like us can now offer military customers the opportunity to bring AI-capabilities to any mission.

zmicro ZMicro | www.zmicro.com

EXECUTIVE SPEAKOUT

ADVERTORIAL

A case for sealed, conduction-cooled 1U/2U rugged rackmount servers

By Chris A. Ciufo, Chief Technology Officer at General Micro Systems, Inc.

Silent, high MTBF, with a wide temperature range and low EMI, an industry-first brings sealed, exceptionally rugged conduction-cooled servers to high shock/ vibration environments.

The Department of Defense uses air-cooled, rackmount servers by the truckload and boatload – racks upon racks installed in buildings, command post tents, ships and submarines, in the back of MRAPs and Strykers, and flying in reconnaissance platforms.

While the requirements for a basic server are similar however used, the environments in which they are used vary greatly, from air-conditioned data centers or field command post tents with fairly predictable temperatures to an open door to a Coast Guard Jay Hawk helicopter with rotors beating the air in a snow squall in Dutch Harbor, AK. Moreover, ground, ship and airborne platforms must also withstand shock, vibration, salt, fog, humidity and liquids like blood, de-icing fluid or diesel fuel. However, a typical COTS air-cooled rackmount server installed in any of these brutal environments faces a hard and likely short life. As discussed in my article elsewhere in this issue, the solution is conduction cooling, which has been the preferred approach to all military high-performance embedded systems – with the exception of servers.

Conduction-cooled chassis boxes are ATR- or small form factor (SFF)-type hard mounted or installed in trays and are common in massively metal ground vehicles or avionics platforms like fighter jets and airborne pods, where “ram air” from flight provides the sidewall flow-through or impingement cooling. Flow-through cooling is also common in wide body platforms like C-17, E-3, EA-6B, P-8A and others where the cabin is humanfriendly and air-conditioned air is readily available. Both chassis types – with a cold plate (vehicles and ships) or sidewall flow-through – are environmentally sealed.

Conduction-Cooled Chassis: Air or Cold Plate These sealed airborne or armored vehicles chassis boxes are completely passively cooled and may radiate or convect some heat into the surrounding environment.

However, they primarily rely on conducting heat from the internal electronics to either the hollow sidewalls or to the chassis cold plate usually found on the bottom of the chassis. Rigidly mounted to the vehicle, heat is then transferred from the box to the mounting tray or vehicle, where it is conducted away due to the massive heat sink offered by the vehicle itself, or air is blown through the cold plate sidewalls and exhausted elsewhere. This kind of cooling is also quite common in UAVs and helicopters, where lightweight SFF conduction-cooled chassis are installed in pods, mastmounted sights or against the fuselage.

Hybrid Conduction-Cooled Servers General Micro Systems (GMS) has been providing conduction-cooled ATR, small form factor (SFF), and specialty chassis like those described above for nearly 40 years. Our sealed products have been passively cooled without fans or with sidewall/plenum flow-through cooling, and we’ve recently applied this thermal experience to 1U and 2U rackmount servers.

The benefits to servers include high reliability and MTBF; superior cooling of Intel’s latest Scalable Xeon® 24 core (>150W) embedded CPUs; sealed chassis with substantially reduced EMI; high shock and vibration tolerance; the ability to add 38999 milcircular connectors, and completely silent operation (without 10,000 RPM screaming fans). In addition, in a 2U conduction-cooled server, up to two 250W Nvidia V100

MES GMS July19 Speakout.indd 2

GMS TITAN-1U conduction-cooled server

GMS TITAN-2U conduction-cooled server

GPGPU co-processors can be conduction cooled – as proven in our deployed X422 “Lightning” GPGPU artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning system. Dual 8-drive encrypted SSD cartridges and up to 10 add-in cards in only 2U prove that these are no-compromise servers for exceptionally rugged applications.

GMS’ 1U and 2U conduction-cooled servers utilize internal conductioncooled heat sinks and cold plates as well as our patented RuggedCool™ hotspot thermal cooling and other patentpending thermal techniques never before applied to production-quality, rugged COTS rackmount servers. Our TITAN Series 1U and 2U conductioncooled rackmount servers rely on a central radiator air plenum through which air is blown (or evacuated). All the internal thermal structures move heat into the central radiator plenum, which gives up its heat to the flow-through air to be exhausted out the rear (typical) or front (custom). The rack or vehicle system provides the airflow, allowing the server to be mounted in any location or orientation, including standalone without a rack.

General Micro Systems, Inc. www.gms4sbc.com

7/12/19 12:21 PM

ADVERTORIAL

EXECUTIVE SPEAKOUT

AI on the Fly ™: Bringing Data Center AI Capabilities to Battlefield Autonomous Vehicles

By Tim Miller, Vice President of Strategic Development at One Stop Systems In the civilian world the quest to remove humans from behind the wheel with truly autonomous vehicles is driving billions of dollars in investment by car manufacturers and transportation service providers. This ultimately eliminates most automobile accidents while saving thousands of lives a year. Bringing similar technology to the battlefield will enhance mission accomplishment while significantly moving soldiers out of harm’s way.

In the current development phase of commercial autonomous vehicles, leading transportation companies are starting to deploy fleets of development and prototype cars. These fleets are used to gather required data to develop and test artificial intelligence algorithms needed to enable the vehicle to see, hear, think and make decisions just like human drivers.

Military applications leverage much of this commercial driver-less development; however, to concurrently address battlefield ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance) mission requirements, substantial compute performance will be required not only in the development vehicles but deployed vehicles as well.

Battlefield autonomous vehicles will need to be outfitted with specialized high performance edge computing equipment.

This equipment will perform AI machine learning and inference in real time to create high fidelity models of its environment and the data analysis, threat detection and target acquisition functions to accomplish its tactical mission.

All of this compute equipment needs to be highly ruggedized and specialized to meet the stringent environmental, space constraints and operational requirements of the battlefield. This combination of requirements is ideally addressed with

AI on the Fly™ technologies where specialized high-performance accelerated computing resources for deep learning training are deployed in the field near the data source. In traditional AI solutions deep learning training has been a centralized datacenter process andinferencing only occurs in the field. In contrast AI on the Fly moves this capability to the edge and allows rapid response to new data with continual reinforcement and transfer learning. This localized capability is critical to effectively performing fundamental battlefield autonomous vehicle tasks without reliance on remote resources.

AI on the Fly consists of three modular sub-systems; data ingest from a network of sensor devices, data storage and a set of customized compute engines. These subsystems support high speed components including data capture hardware, NVMe SSD storage and GPU and FPGA compute accelerators all with PCI Express interfaces for flexible scaling with high bandwidth and low latency. The data ingest system must be capable of absorbing the vast amounts of data continually flowing in from the sensors and process the data for efficient delivery to both the persistent storage as well as the compute engines. The compute functions include machine learning tasks using traditional data science tools, deep learning neural network frameworks, and inference prediction using trained models and real time data. Each of these elements requires specialized GPU or FPGA resources. AI on the Fly provides all of these elements in flexible building block components that are easily customized to the specific requirement of the vehicle mission.

One Stop Systems (OSS) a pioneer in AI on the Fly is working with some of the industry leaders to provide technology for their autonomous vehicle programs. These companies look to OSS as their trusted development partner because of its technical expertise in specialized high performance edge computing. They rely on OSS’s vast experience in developing scalable PCI Express based systems packaged in specialized rugged building block form factors.

AI on the Fly is playing a key role in the development of driverless ISTAR vehicles for tomorrow’s battlefield.

One Stop Systems www.onestopsystems.com

CONNECTING WITH MIL EMBEDDED

By Mil-Embedded.com Editorial Staff

www.mil-embedded.com

GIVING BACK | MARKET PULSE | WHITE PAPER | BLOG | VIDEO | SOCIAL MEDIA | WEBCAST GIVING BACK

The Warrior-Scholar Project Each issue, the editorial staff of Military Embedded Systems will highlight a different charitable organization that benefits the military, veterans, and their families. We are honored to cover the technology that protects those who protect us every day. To back that up, our parent company – OpenSystems Media – will make a donation to every group we showcase on this page.

This issue we are highlighting the Warrior-Scholar Project (WSP), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that was originally founded by Yale University classmates Chris Howell, Jesse Reising, and Nick Rugoff with the aim of ensuring excellence in educational opportunities for exiting U.S. enlisted service personnel.

To that end, the program seeks to provide a way forward academically for enlisted military veterans following their transition out of service by building a skill bridge from enlisted service to a top-tier academic curriculum; helping to build the academic confidence level of each participant; and ensuring that participants leave the program with a better understanding of the higher-education landscape and what gaining admission to a top college entails.

The WSP runs highly intensive, totally immersive, one- and two-week college-preparatory academic boot camps hosted at America’s top colleges and universities for current and former enlisted service members who want to pursue higher education.

These boot camps are offered at no cost to the student-veteran participant. During the boot camp, highly successful studentveterans who have transitioned from the military to college guide WSP participants alongside dedicated university tenured faculty.

The participants are introduced to analytic reading, writing, and other academic and everyday skills crucial to success in higher education in both liberal arts and STEM tracks. Importantly, they also learn about the many challenges that are experienced by student-veterans during their transition from military service to college, including the complex university application and admissions processes.

For more information on the Warrior-Scholar Project, please visit www.warrior-scholar.org.

WEBCAST

WHITE PAPER

Making it Cool: Solving Thermal Management Challenges in Military Electronics

Strategies for Deploying Xilinx’s Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC

Sponsors: Atrenne Computing Solutions, Kontron, nVent Schroff

RFSoC [radio-frequency system-on-chip] brings new possibilities for addressing some of the most challenging requirements of high-bandwidth, high-channel-count systems. Understanding how this new technology can specifically address SWaP-C and low-latency applications is key to matching it to many applications that can benefit from it the most. Equipment manufacturers like Pentek, using RFSoC at the center of their board architecture, can leverage the power of RFSoC by providing unique solutions to streamline the path from RFSoC to a deployed system solution

Modern processors, graphics processors, FPGAs, etc. provide untold performance benefits, but also generate excessive amounts of heat. Getting rid of this heat and keeping electronics cool is essential for designers of electronic warfare, radar, and other processing-intensive military applications. This need to dissipate excess heat in electronics has become even more important as the electronics footprint of many parts continues to shrink.

By Robert Sgandurra, Pentek

Join us for this webcast, during which industry experts will cover various methods for solving thermal management challenges in military systems when integrating commercial processing technology.

This white paper covers current trends in data converters and signal processing to give readers a better appreciation of the capabilities of RFSoC and how to best use the advantages of this technology.

View webcast: http://bit.ly/2xAALvB

Read more white papers: http://mil-embedded.com/white-papers/

View more webcasts: http://opensystemsmedia.com/events/e-cast/schedule

46 July/August 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Read the white paper: https://bit.ly/2Gck9yW

www.mil-embedded.com

WHERE TECHNOLOGY EXPERTS GATHER

MARKET TRENDS, TECHNOLOGY UPDATES, INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS Military Embedded Systems focuses on embedded electronics – hardware and software – for military applications through technical coverage of all parts of the design process. The website, Resource Guide, e-mags, newsletters, and print editions provide insight on embedded tools and strategies such as software, hardware, systems, technology insertion, obsolescence management, and many other military-specific technical subjects.

Coverage includes the latest innovative products, technology, and market trends driving military embedded applications such as radar, sonar, unmanned system payloads, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare, C4ISR, avionics, imaging, and more. Each issue provides readers with the information they need to stay connected to the pulse of embedded technology in the military and aerospace industries. mil-embedded.com

The Big Thing in

RFSoC is Here.

(And it’s only 2.5 inches wide!)

Small

Powerful Deployable

Pentek’s Model 6001 FPGA board lets you quickly develop and deploy RFSoC technology, while optimizing your system for SWaP. Mounted on your custom carrier or Pentek’s proven 3U VPX carrier, the new QuartzXM® comes pre-loaded with a full suite of IP modules, robust software, and fully integrated hardware — all geared to shorten time to market and reduce design risk.

And at only 4"x2.5", it can be deployed in extremely compact environments, including aircraft pods, unmanned vehicles, mast-mounted radars and more.

• QuartzXM eXpress Module speeds migration to custom form factors • Powerful Zynq® Ultrascale+™ RFSoC with built-in wideband A/Ds, D/As & ARM processors • Dual 100 GigE interfaces for extreme system connectivity • Robust Factory-Installed IP for waveform generation, real-time data acquisition and more • Board Resources include PCIe Gen.3 x8 and 16 GB DDR4 SDRAM • Navigator® Design Suite BSP and FPGA design kit for seamless integration with Xilinx Vivado®

Unleash the Power of the RFSoC. Download the FREE White Paper! www.pentek.com/go/mesrfsoc

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Pentek, Inc., One Park Way, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458 Phone: 201-818-5900 • Fax: 201-818-5904 • email: info@pentek.com • www.pentek.com Worldwide Distribution & Support, Copyright © 2019 Pentek, Inc. Pentek, Quartz, QuartzXM and Navigator are trademarks of Pentek, Inc. Other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.