Military Embedded Systems June 2020

@military_cots

John McHale

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Space buzz

MilTech Trends AI paradox at the tactical edge

Industry Spotlight Why space needs AI SpaceVPX and interconnect MIL-EMBEDDED.COM

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June 2020 | Volume 16 | Number 4

SMALL SATS AND THE GAMBLE ON COTS IN SPACE

P 14 Q&A with Tom Smelker, vice president and general manager for Mercury Systems Custom Microelectronic Solutions

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 42

June 2020 Volume 16 | Number 4

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COLUMNS Editor’s Perspective 7 Space market buzz: SpaceX launch, military funding steady

By John McHale

Technology Update 8 Birds on the battlefield: Research into “living network nodes” for contested zones

By Lisa Daigle

Mil Tech Insider 9 Open architecture drives U.S. Army’s Future Vertical Lift program

FEATURES PERSPECTIVES: Executive Interview 14 Small sats, custom microelectronics, and the end of Moore’s law Q&A with Tom Smelker, vice president and general manager for Mercury Systems Custom Microelectronic Solutions

By John McHale, Group Editorial Director SPECIAL REPORT: Small Sats

By Mark Grovak and Chris Thomson

18 New era of space-based computing is underway

By Sally Cole, Senior Editor

THE LATEST

MIL TECH TRENDS: Enabling Artificial Intelligence in Military Systems

Defense Tech Wire 10 By Emma Helfrich Connecting with Mil Embedded 46 By Mil-Embedded Staff

22 Tackling the AI paradox at the tactical edge

By Emma Helfrich, Associate Editor 26 When will artificial general intelligence be ready for smart weapon and 8

sensor systems?

By David Sherwood and Terry Higbee, Cognitive Science & Solutions

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT: Enabling COTS in Space Electronics Systems 30 Why space needs artificial intelligence

By Paul Armijo and George Williams, GSI Technology 34 SpaceVPX and the world of interconnect

By C. Patrick Collier, Harris; and Michael Walmsley, TE Connectivity

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38 Saving power and system cost with commercial parts qualified for space

applications

By Ken O’Neill, Microchip Technology 42 Contested space, small sats, and the gamble on COTS in space

By John McHale, Group Editorial Director

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4 June 2020

ON THE COVER: The Lunar Flashlight is a very small six-unit satellite (12 by 24 by 36 centimeters) developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The CubeSat mission – set to launch in late 2020 – uses an optical receiver aligned with four lasers that will sequentially pulse the lunar landscape to look for water ice and other volatiles associated with conditions in the moon’s permanently shadowed craters. Illustration: NASA.

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Analog Devices – The trust and agility to win the New Space Race

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Analog Devices – We have you covered from Alpha to Zulu

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 CREATIVE DIRECTOR Stephanie Sweet stephanie.sweet@opensysmedia.com SENIOR WEB DEVELOPER Aaron Ganschow aaron.ganschow@opensysmedia.com

Behlman Electronics – Some claim only full mil-spec power supplies cut it on the front lines.

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Cobham Semiconductor Solutions – KA-band AESA technology

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Elma Electronic – Development to deployment

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GMS – Rugged servers.

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Millennium International – Engineered avionics solutions

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Pentek – The big thing in RFSoC is here.

(And it’s only 2.5 inches wide!)

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Phoenix International – Phalanx II: The ultimate NAS

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PICO Electronics – .18" ht.

Size does matter!

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State of the Art – No boundaries!

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EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE

Space market buzz: SpaceX launch, military funding steady John.McHale@opensysmedia.com

By John McHale, Editorial Director

Spaceflight is exciting again. Not that it ever stopped being exciting, but the launch of the Dragon by SpaceX and enthusiasm about watching a new type of rocket take humans into space again might be just a little more inspiring than, say, launching satellites into orbit.

Excitement also abounds with the space market, whether entrepreneurial (SpaceX), commercial (small sat constellations), or military (classified satellites with long mission life). It’s good to be Elon Musk right now, but it’s also good to be a provider of electronic components for space applications.

Designers of radiation-hardened microelectronics – such as integrated circuits, memories, diodes, and the like – whom I interviewed for the Industry Spotlight article on page 42 told me that they continue to see a strong market, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Most of the overall military space market has held up strong to date,” says Josh Broline, director of marketing and applications, Industrial and Communications Business Division at Renesas. “We are at the back end of the procurements cycle, so there is limited impact from the pandemic economically on this market. Several programs are already baked in. There might be some delays here or there, but not a major impact.”

“Right now spending [for space programs is incredible,” says Marti McCurdy, owner and CEO of Spirit Electronics. And as long as the Trump administration continues its spending policy this growth will continue – even amidst the pandemic and economic shutdown, she adds.

A continued flow of government funding for space platforms, as well as the funding to help small business, are a few of the factors enabling this market strength.

“We continue to see the government making concerted efforts to move forward and make decisions quickly when it comes to procurement and moving programs forward,” says Tony Jordan, director of business development at Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions. “This helps to stimulate the economy and keep the supply chains going, offsetting some weaknesses due to the economic slowdown from the pandemic. There is a lot of opportunity out there – and not just in military applications – but in also areas such as the Lunar Gateway and civil space modernization.”

“We know the government is doing everything it can to support small business so they’re not at a standstill,” says Anton Quiroz, CEO of Apogee Semiconductor.

“Although I‘m a little concerned about what could happen six months from now. All this cash the government is spending has to come from somewhere and it could be the defense budget. Also, a new administration could institute a big reprioritization that could impact the military and space budgets.”

The pandemic has clearly not slowed down defense production, but there have been some cultural adjustments. Having many of their engineers working from home was a new scenario for defense prime contractors who had to be concerned about lower productivity. However, I’ve heard a few anecdotes that actually the opposite was true, with productivity increasing in many instances. www.mil-embedded.com

“One surprise was that even with so many prime contractor engineers working from home, productivity appears to have not suffered and we are still getting many customer emails and request for quotes from buyers,” says Joe Benedetto, president of VPT Components.

Another impact of the COVID-19 spread has been the realization of just how much the U.S. relies on foreign supply chains – especially from Asia – for not only pharmaceuticals but also semiconductor production, as many foundries used by U.S. semiconductors are located offshore.

“For military-specific applications there is a lot of focus on the U.S.-only based supply chain, ensuring trusted foundry use,” Quiroz says. “This is somewhat COVID19-related, as the pandemic put a spotlight on what has been known for years: that the U.S. is too dependent on international suppliers for notably pharmaceuticals, but for semiconductors as well.

“Many companies think building more onshore foundries is an expensive endeavor and would be time-consuming to have it equal the state-of-the-art quality of many offshore foundries,” he continues. “However, you can make current onshore foundries develop capabilities to make more rad-hard parts using standard commercial processes without investing in expensive new equipment.”

Regardless of where the parts are produced, the future is bright for companies supplying electronics for space.

This market could also be promising for young engineers.

“If I were an engineering student in college today, a unique path I could take would be radiation-effects engineer,” Broline suggests. “The demand for more nimble and flexible satellite operators will only increase as the commercialization of space continues.”

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

June 2020 7

TECHNOLOGY UPDATE

Birds on the battlefield: Research into “living network nodes” for contested zones

By Lisa Daigle Trained animals – including birds of prey and even dogs – may play a role in helping military forces manage mobile networks on the battlefield and in risky areas, according to a team of researchers at the U.S. Navy’s Naval Postgraduate School (NPS – Monterey, California).

Alex Bordetsky, professor of information sciences at the U.S. Navy’s Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and director of the school’s Center for Network Innovation and Experimentation (CENETIX), has recently focused on what he calls “networks with short living nodes and links … I named it ‘networks that don’t exist’ – meaning that that they don’t exist for noticeable period(s) of time or within well-defined areas of space … so they move quickly, from one place to another, and then their setting changes.”

Short-lived networks could be useful on the battlefield: A roving location for a network connection, a quick volley of information, then the network vanishes before an adversary can intercept information. Aside from being less noticeable than machine nodes, biological nodes including birds (like falcons) or dogs would not be affected by tracking, GPS jamming, or other deliberate disruptions.

The CENETIX team, with longstanding support from the NPS Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER), has steered its research in some unconventional directions: Over the past two years, this research road less traveled has included development and testing of nodes that produce short, what it calls “burst-y” communications in mesh networks.

Bordetsky says that such transient nodes are potentially valuable parts of a system that is “specifically suitable for contested environments in which cyber physical clutter is predominant,” for example if both friendly and hostile forces are communicating over multiple channels in a small area or when one of the sides is underwater.

“In modern warfare you have nothing if you do not have network,” says Eugene Bourakov, senior researcher and chief engineer for the CENETIX team: Increased network-node range and discreteness is a must to maintain the advantage.

Army Special Forces Majs. Brandon Davis and Garrett Whittaker previously examined the usefulness of mesh networks in integrating counter-drone, or counter-unmanned aerial system (UAS) sensors in Android tactical assault kits (ATAKs), a smartphone app used in the field for geospatial infrastructure and military situational awareness.

The pair discovered that self-contained mesh networks enabled local ATAKs to talk to each other without using the internet, which opposition forces could detect and intercept.

For this newer mobile-node project, Whittaker explains, “What we’re doing is we’re taking the server – which was historically run on like a large pipe internet from a cloud-based server – and putting it on a standalone laptop that’s not connected to the internet and running that server across this much lower bandwidth.”

The research comes, say Navy officials, as the U.S Department of Defense (DoD) sets itself up to counter future adversaries who will use electronic signatures to detect, locate, and target U.S. troops on the battlefield.

8 June 2020

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

The idea for incorporating birds of prey as mobile relays to enable moveable tactical networks combines several research threads at NPS, with an additional approach stemming from civilian falconry, Marine Corps Maj. Joshua Freedman reported during a previous conference held at NPS in 2018. One of those research endeavors investigated the use of a modified grenade launcher to fire a network device into the air, where it hung from a small parachute and relayed bursts of data to ground nodes.

Freedman and a colleague Maj. Justin Murphy took the concept of using falcons for a similar function from research into the use of trained birds to detect and take down small drones, plus the trend of falconers strapping tiny video cameras to their birds, Freedman said.

The researchers also suggested dogs could be used for short-lived mobile ground-based network hubs.

The CENETIX team now intends to take its fast-moving node thesis to space: In a launch intended for June 2020, the researchers – working with the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, Mechatronics, and UAS company AeroVironment, and in collaboration with NPS Space Systems Academic Group (SSAG) – will send a CubeSat payload into low orbit in a test of multidomain mesh networking capabilities with fastmoving nodes in space. www.mil-embedded.com

MIL TECH INSIDER

Open architecture drives U.S. Army’s Future Vertical Lift program

By Mark Grovak and Chris Thomson An industry perspective from Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions Prototype designs for the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program, one of the U.S. Army’s most important and game-changing initiatives, are fully embracing the open architecture design philosophy for the next-generation helicopters that will replace its fleet of OH58 Kiowa Warrior, AH64 Apache, and UH60 Black Hawk rotorcraft.

The Army is currently holding a competition to select the winning design for two of the new platforms being developed under FVL: the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) to replace the OH58 Kiowa Warrior and AH64 Apache and the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) replacement for the UH60 Blackhawk. In March 2020, the Army announced that it had short-listed Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky Aircraft and Bell Textron Helicopter’s designs for FARA and prototypes from Bell and a combined offering from Sikorsky and Boeing to compete for FLRAA. These programs represent a true milestone for the Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) approach that is key to both FARA and FLRAA prototype designs.

The Army sees MOSA as the means to developing an objective architecture for both aviation and mission systems electronics that will deliver more control over the systemupgrade process. Moreover, MOSA will help the government achieve its goal of establishing commonality wherever possible between the two winning aircraft designs. This commonality will free the Army from having to rely directly on the prime contractor to upgrade a system. Instead, the subsystem architecture will be defined with sufficient granularity that the government will be able to satisfy upgrade requirements through third-party suppliers, which will help drive competition, interoperability, and cost reductions. Going forward, the MOSA approach will provide the Army with greater flexibility, reduce time to deployment, and deliver long-term savings.

Suppliers of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts are well-positioned to support the FVL programs, leveraging packaging and integration advances to optimize the performance of the next-generation helicopters and realize the true benefits of the MOSA approach. For example, on helicopters, where every additional pound of weight impacts fuel usage and mission distance and duration, the ability to consolidate linereplaceable units (LRU) by integrating multiple functions into the same chassis will deliver huge weight and cost advantages. Instead of having separate subsystems for the aircraft’s pitot-static probes, used to determine airspeed, and its air data computer (ADC), housing both of these functions in a single LRU will enable system designers to reduce both LRU count and overall weight. Similarly, most military helicopters carry a cockpit voice recorder, flight-data recorder, health and usage monitoring (HUMS), and sometimes a separate video recorder. Using COTS building blocks, all of these functions can be integrated into a single LRU. Even better, integrating voice recording, data recording HUMS, and image recording into a single chassis results in an elegant and efficient solution for military flight operations quality assurance (MFOQA) that provides HUMS capability in a size, weight, and power (SWaP)-optimized box.

Another leap forward for open architecture design is the planned use of “digital backbones” on the FARA and FLRAA aircraft. Segregating the digital backbone for the aviation system and the aircraft’s mission systems mitigates the possibility that any future changes or upgrades to the mission systems will introduce the risk of adverse impacts on the aviation network. This approach promises to ease and speed technology refresh for these helicopters for years to come, reducing the need to recertify www.mil-embedded.com

the entire aircraft bus architecture and the need for regression testing whenever new technologies or capabilities need to be integrated.

Another MOSA breakthrough is the improved ability to accommodate new emerging technologies such as remotely piloted flight and diminished visual environment (DVE) operation. Both the FARA and FLRAA rotorcraft designs support standard options for single pilot or unpiloted flight. COTS vendors that provide DO-254 safety-certifiable avionics solutions are well-positioned to support avionics that meet unpiloted flight requirements.

Likewise, the FVL aircraft will require highly secure COTS solutions that protect critical data from falling into the wrong hands in the event that an aircraft is lost. Proven COTS-based data recorder subsystems that support the NSA-sponsored Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) program can be a cost-effective SWaP-optimized solution for protecting sensitive data aboard the new FVL platforms.

The COTS community is witnessing the realization of the promise of the open architecture approach, with the Army, Navy, and Air Force embracing open standards as never before. We’re seeing it both in important initiatives such as the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) and C4ISR/EW [electronic warfare] Modular Open Suite of Standards (CMOSS) and in programs like FVL that are leading the way in bringing the advantages of open architectures to the warfighter.

Mark Grovak is director, Avionics Business Development, at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions. Chris Thomson is vice president of the Avionics Division for Curtiss-Wright.

Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions www.curtisswrightds.com

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

June 2020 9

DEFENSE TECH WIRE NEWS | TRENDS | DOD SPENDS | CONTRACTS | TECHNOLOGY UPDATES

By Emma Helfrich, Associate Editor

AI contract for Pentagon garnered by Booz Allen Hamilton IT consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton has won a five-year, $800 million task order to provide artificial intelligence (AI) services to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). Under the terms of the contract, Booz Allen Hamilton will provide the JAIC with data labeling, data management, data conditioning, AI product development, and the transition of AI products into new and existing fielded programs, according to the government’s announcement of the contract. The contract will support the JAIC’s new joint warfighting mission initiative, launched in the first months of 2020.

Figure 1 | The JAIC will be provided with the transition of artificial intelligence (AI) products into new and existing fielded programs.

DARPA image.

JAIC director Lt. Jack Shanahan said of the project: “The joint warfighting mission initiative will provide the Joint Force with AI-enabled solutions vital to improving operational effectiveness in all domains.

This contract will be an important element as the JAIC increasingly focuses on fielding AI-enabled capabilities that meet the needs of the warfighter and decision-makers at every level.”

HD55 gimbaled camera system tested for tactical UASs Trillium Engineering, company specializing in gimbaled camera systems for small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), announced that it has begun airborne testing of its lightweight, high-definition HD55 system. Designed for use on Group 2 and smaller Group 3 UAS, the HD55 employs electro-optical (EO) and cryogenically cooled mid-wave infrared (MWIR) cameras, as well as an onboard image processor. The gimbal is 5.5 inches in diameter and weighs 1750 grams.

According to the company, the HD55 replaces the end-of-life HD50, which came in four configurations and was first delivered to customers in November 2014. Trillium officials say the HD50-MV was the smallest cooled MWIR gimbaled camera system on the market. The company also claims that the new HD55 will have the same swept volume as its predecessor but will be slightly lighter and more capable than the HD50.

Solar power satellite hardware tested in orbit U.S. Naval Research Laboratory engineers launched the Photovoltaic Radio-frequency Antenna Module (PRAM), aboard an Air Force X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle as part of a comprehensive investigation into prospective terrestrial use of solar energy captured in space. The 12-inch-square tile module will test the ability to harvest power from its solar panel and transform the energy to a radio frequency microwave. This flight experiment enables researchers to test the hardware in actual space conditions.

This current experiment focuses on the energy-conversion process and resulting thermal performance. The hardware will provide researchers with temperature data and will examine PRAM’s efficiency in energy production. Depending on the results, the team aims ultimately to build a fully functional system on a dedicated spacecraft to test the transmission of energy back to Earth. The development of a space-based solar capability could potentially help provide energy to remote installations like forward operating bases and disaster response areas.

10 June 2020

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Figure 2 | The Photovoltaic Radio-frequency Antenna Module (PRAM), with a 12-inch ruler for scale. U.S. Navy photo.

www.mil-embedded.com

Laser weapon modernization to be led by Dynetics Dynetics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Leidos, is part of the U.S. Army’s weapon modernization initiatives, where the latest directed-energy weapon is increasing its power from a 100 kW-class system to a 300kW-class system. Marking the official transition to the Indirect Fires Protection CapabilityHigh Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) endeavor in January 2020, the U.S. Army modified the existing contract to support ongoing efforts to increase laser capability. In late 2019, the U.S. Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) also announced a High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative (HELSI) contract award by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) that will support the IFPC-HEL effort.

Figure 3 | Dynetics was awarded the original $130 million contract to build and test HEL-TVD in May 2019. Dynetics photo.

These design initiatives follow the progress made on the High Energy Laser Tactical Vehicle Demonstrator (HEL-TVD). As the prime contractor for IFPC-HEL, Dynetics is set to demonstrate a 300 kW-class prototype system in FY22. The solution is designed to provide continued support to defend against hostile unmanned aerial systems and rockets, artillery, and mortars.

Intelligence-gathering to be enhanced under AFWERX contract

Countermeasures system to equip KC-130J planes

AI.Reverie, a company specializing in synthetic data generation and machine learning, announced that it has won an AFWERX Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I contract to enhance computer vision models for the U.S. DoD. The award extends AI.Reverie’s current partnership with the U.S. Air Force to the U.S. Army.

BAE Systems has announced a $26.7 million U.S. Navy contract to fit its infrared countermeasures system onto KC-130J cargo and refueling planes. The contract calls for installing, integrating, and testing the Department of the Navy’s Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasures system (LAIRCM) on the planes. The system is a defensive warning package combining a missile warning system and infrared laser jammer countermeasure system to protect the aircraft from guided missiles. Up to 19 KC-130J Navy aircraft will receive the system; installation will take place in Crestview, Florida, in conjunction with defense contractor Vertex Aerospace.

The DoD is looking to AI.Reverie to accelerate reconnaissance to the speed required in a contingency environment. The computer vision dictates that power intelligence gathering must be trained on data from classified locations and hard-to-reach places.

Pentagon AI experts have detailed the high-cost, labor intensive labeling process the data must then undergo before it can be put to work.

AI.Reverie’s synthetic data platform is designed to automatically generate millions of annotated, diverse images, delivering them quickly and cheaply. AI.Reverie aims to generate images across the electromagnetic spectrum that will empower soldiers to more accurately identify objects and make lifesaving decisions.

The KC-130 series, built by Lockheed Martin, is capable of aircraft carrier landings despite its large size. The aircraft, according to its maker, is capable of detecting and tracking incoming missiles and carries missile-warning sensors, a compact laser pointer/tracker, and a processor in a single pod that can be readily transferred between aircraft.

Miniature UAS/missile order placed by U.S. Army The U.S. Army has awarded a one-year, $76 million award to unmanned aircraft system (UAS) maker AeroVironment to procure the company’s Switchblade loitering missile system. According to company information, the Switchblade is a backpackable, rapidly deployable UAS/missile that can be launched from ground platforms – including from a 6-pack launcher – that enables the warfighter to access rapid-response force protection and precision-strike capabilities up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) from its launch location. The missile’s specialized effects and wave-off feature is key to the missile’s targeting flexibility.

The contract award was funded for the first year of procurement with deliveries expected to begin by September 2020. Two additional one-year options, currently unfunded, would extend the period of performance through April 2023. www.mil-embedded.com

Figure 4 | The small Switchblade loitering missile system will be procured by the U.S. Army. AeroVironment image.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

June 2020 11

DEFENSE TECH WIRE NEWS | TRENDS | DOD SPENDS | CONTRACTS | TECHNOLOGY UPDATES

AI-enabled, Loyal Wingman UAS revealed by Boeing A Boeing-led Australian industry team has presented the first unmanned Loyal Wingman aircraft to the Royal Australian Air Force, a historic milestone for the company and the Commonwealth, according to officials.

The aircraft, which uses artificial intelligence to extend the capabilities of manned and unmanned platforms, is the first to be designed, engineered, and manufactured in Australia in more than 50 years.

Figure 5 | Boeing Australia has built the first of three Loyal Wingman aircraft, to serve as the foundation for the Boeing Airpower Teaming System. The aircraft are designed to fly alongside existing platforms and use artificial intelligence to conduct teaming missions.

Boeing photo.

As the first of three prototypes for Australia’s Loyal Wingman Advanced Development Program, the aircraft also serves as the foundation for the Boeing Airpower Teaming System (ATS) being developed for the global defense market. The aircraft was engineered using a digital twin to model its structures, systems, capabilities and full life cycle requirements; manufactured with Boeing’s resin-infused single composite piece; and assembled using an advanced manufacturing process. The Loyal Wingman prototype now moves into ground testing, followed by taxi and first flight in the latter part of 2020.

Cybersecurity contract awarded to VMD IT-security firm VMD (Fairfax, Virginia) announced that it is among the small group of federal government contractors to be awarded the new Highly Adaptive Cybersecurity Services (HACS) Special Item Number (SIN) contract by the General Services Administration (GSA). The HACS SIN is designed to provide federal agencies quicker and more reliable access to pre-vetted companies with proven experience delivering cybersecurity support services to the federal government.

VMD’s designation enables the company to compete for new cybersecurity requirements from federal agencies across the government through GSA’s IT Schedule 70. Currently, the HACS SIN is available through the Information Technology Category (ITC) under the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS). The HACS SIN is designed to give agencies quicker access to key support services from technically evaluated vendors that will expand agencies’ capacity to test their high-priority IT systems, address potential vulnerabilities, and stop adversaries before they impact agency networks.

Comms for U.S. Space Force the subject of $500 million contract with L3Harris L3Harris Technologies has won a five-year, $500 million ceiling, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contract – with an initial delivery order of $30.6 million – with the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) to supply the Air Force and Army Anti-jam Modem (A3M). A3M is in use by both the Department of the Air Force and Army, as it provides a secure, wideband, antijam satellite communications terminal modem for tactical satellite communication operations.

L3Harris is set to collaborate with SMC on the design, development, fabrication, integration, certification, and testing of Block 1 modems for use in the Air Force Ground Multiband Terminal and the Army Satellite Transportable Terminal. The modems support SMC’s Protected Tactical Waveform technology, an antijam capability operating on military satellite communication terminals.

Rugged firewall receives NIAP cybersecurity certification Crystal announced that the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) Common Criteria has certified its rugged firewall. Achieving NIAP approval represents a milestone in tactical cybersecurity, proving the firewall’s effective layer of protection for networked communications in multiple harsh domains. The VPN-capable firewall is designed to provide both rugged and critical cybersecurity defense needed for networking in unpredictable, forward-deployed environments. Versatile technology and reliable protection of critical networks in a rugged form factor.

IAP, established by the National Security Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the governing U.S. body within the Common Criteria Recognition Arrangement (CCRA), a 31country consortium that is the de facto global standard for IT security.

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Figure 6 | The rugged firewall is made to be used in forward-deployed environments. Crystal Group photo.

www.mil-embedded.com

Optical interconnects to bolster digital microelectronics Researchers from Intel and Ayar Labs working on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) program have replaced the traditional electrical input/output (I/O) of a stateof-the-art field programmable gate array (FPGA) with efficient optical signaling interfaces.

Using Intel’s advanced packaging and interconnect technology, the team integrated Ayar’s TeraPHY optical chiplet and the Intel FPGA core in a single package, creating a multichip module (MCM) with in-package optics. The integrated solution is designed to enable high-speed data links with single mode optical fibers coming directly from the FPGA. Built in GlobalFoundries’ advanced photonics process, the co-packaged TeraPHY chiplet used for this demonstration is capable of 2 Terabits per second (Tbps) of I/O bandwidth at a small fraction of power compared to electrical I/O, according to the companies.

Figure 7 | Intel’s advanced packaging and interconnect technology. DARPA/Ayar Labs image.

Detect and Avoid System to equip two MQ-9 RPA

UGVs to be delivered to the U.K. for autonomous R&D

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) and the Air National Guard (ANG) have signed a contract for GA-ASI to supply its Detect and Avoid System (DAAS) for one MQ-9 Block 1 and one MQ-9 Block 5 Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA). The DAAS consists of GA-ASI’s Due Regard Radar (DRR) and processor plus a Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). For the ANG, GA-ASI will upgrade the software in the DRR to add a tactical weather mode, in addition to the air traffic surveillance capability. GA-ASI’s DAA system is also designed to enable safe access to uncontrolled airspace.

Milrem Robotics will deliver two unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to the U.K’s Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). According to the DSTL – whose stated purpose is to maximize the impact of science and technology for the defense and security of the U.K. – it is procuring the unmanned vehicles to explore the capabilities and limitations of these autonomous systems in areas such as mobility, vulnerabilities, and safety.

According to GA-ASI, the DAAS avionics will be integrated into the new Centerline Avionics Bay (CAB), which provides additional volume and mission infrastructure for integrating future capabilities. The CAB’s modular design and additional infrastructure are designed to enable the MQ-9 Block 1 and Block 5 aircraft to be a more open and extensible platform for integration of other emerging capabilities.

Milrem Robotics is supplying the vehicles to DSTL in partnership with QinetiQ, which will integrate autonomous functions to the vehicles and arrange transfer to the end user. In cooperation with QinetiQ, Milrem Robotics is participating in two of the U.K.’s large-scale robotic programs – Joint Tactical Autonomous Resupply and Replenishment and Robotic Platoon Vehicle, both worth over $61.9 million (£50 million) per program. Milrem Robotics THeMIS [Tracked Hybrid Modular Infantry System] unmanned vehicles have already been sold in the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Indonesia, U.K., and U.S.

Nanotech solutions for cyberattacks goal of partnership Personnel from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) joined industry and military partners at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in late February 2020 to discuss a multimillion-dollar cybersecurity project headed by Professor Bertrand Cambou. Cambou, a professor of nanotechnology and cybersecurity in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS), is the principal investigator (PI) on a grant from the U.S. Air Force to develop nanotechnology solutions for cyberattacks and cyber warfare.

SICCS professor Paul Flikkema is the PI on another grant aimed at developing hardware for computer diversity; together, the grants total $6.3 million and include a dozen researchers and students at NAU. The DoD brought in additional partners to aid in the transfer of technologies, with that group meeting recently at NAU to seek clarity on the critical tasks and objectives of the work. www.mil-embedded.com

Figure 8 | The NAU project aims to enable new forms of protection across the landscape of cybersecurity needs and develop and combine several new technologies. U.S. Air Force photo.

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PERSPECTIVES

Executive Interview

Small sats, custom microelectronics, and the end of Moore’s law

By John McHale, Editorial Director

Small satellites and their reduced size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) requirements are challenging microelectronics suppliers to deliver the performance of commercial technology while also maintaining reliability. I discussed these trends in a McHale Report podcast with Tom Smelker, vice president and general manager for Mercury Systems Custom Microelectronic Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona. We also covered sensor processing tends and how artificial intelligence will impact future space applications. Smelker also discussed what he calls the end of Moore’s law and its potential impact on the military electronics market. Edited excerpts follow.

Tom Smelker Vice President and General Manager for Mercury Systems Custom Microelectronic Solutions

MIL-EMBEDDED: Can you please provide our audience with a description of your responsibilities, what your group does at Mercury Systems, and how the company participates in the space industry as well as the military industry?

SMELKER: At Mercury, I’m the vice president and general manager of custom microelectronic solutions. What that really is, is two-and-a-half and 3D heterogeneous computing, focused for defense and space. We really see ourselves as being that channel between the semiconductor industry and the defense industry for these applications.

We’re focusing on enabling our customers to move processing to the sensor edge.

MIL-EMBEDDED: Do you define sensor edge as where the sensors are before the information is even downloaded or downlinked?

SMELKER: Yes, exactly. We can package the microelectronics in smaller packages and put them right there where the sensor is and operate on the data [at that point].

MIL-EMBEDDED: What are the factors driving the development of microelectronics for military space applications these days?

SMELKER: [It is] really being driven by the low-Earth orbit [LEO] being the new frontier. And it’s a really a drastic environmental difference from what previously was our focus on the mid-Earth orbit (MEO) and [geosynchronous Earth orbit] GEO or deep space. So, it brings a whole new capability with being able to use commercial silicon.

Small sats are really designated, in that LEO orbit, for short-mission durations. So, the mission duration also changes that equation as well. When you look at it, the risk equation for the GEO, deep space, and even MEO, is completely different than the LEO small-sat opportunities of today.

MIL-EMBEDDED: Small sats have created some headaches for the more traditional payloads of suppliers of microelectronics, especially in terms of radiation-hardening,

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because their cost constraints are so low, not just about size reduction, but cost. You have a payload that in the past would’ve cost a million dollars, but now they have to deliver the same performance for under $300,000. So, how do you see those changes impacting spacecraft payloads? Is there more COTS [commercial off-the-shelf] instead of custom or is it more just figuring what you need to test versus what you don’t need to test?

SMELKER: It’s both really, I would say; as I mentioned just before, the cost equation for LEO is completely different than the other orbits. And so, that equation has changed. I like to say for the LEO orbit that you have to leverage COTS, astutely, and it’s really focused on custom assembly and packaging that enables reliability. The SWaP-C [size, weight, power, and cost] side of it is a lot different. The small sats also drive the weight performance there as well. So, getting that processing right, that sensor edge that we were talking about earlier, is key. [As is] doing that with commercial silicon in an astute manner that keeps the reliability high enough for the shorter duration that www.mil-embedded.com

these systems spend in that reducedradiation environment.

MIL-EMBEDDED: Speaking of the radiation environment, is there anything you have to do to deliver that same performance that you would get in the higher-priced systems to get the necessary rad tolerance, or is it more an 80% solution sort of thing?

SMELKER: I wouldn’t say 80% solution because you have to have more reliability than that, but there’s a lot of upfront testing, early simulations, upfront testing, and analysis to understand where the susceptibilities are. Once that is understood, we’re able to collaborate with our semiconductor partners as well. Then we can design the assembly and packaging to reduce those susceptibilities to that right risk level. It can’t be 100% like the MEO and GEO orbits, where cost isn’t the risk. It’s how long the system can stay up there. It’s really about selecting the right components, doing the analysis, and designing the solution to that environment. And cost is critical in all that. So easy, right?

MIL-EMBEDDED: Going back to Earth, but still talking about sensor processing at the edge, in the last DoD budget requests, the hottest funding areas were for radar upgrades, electronic warfare (EW), and the like. How are those requirements affecting microelectronics designs?

Are there similarities to space or is it a different customer need?

SMELKER: That’s a great question. This is an exciting time to be in defense and working on sensor systems. I’d say we’re in a renaissance era for microelectronics.

And if you look at it and at commercial and at defense sensor systems, we’re really in what I call the data age, and we would like to be in the information age.

People think we’re in the information age, but until we have the processing at the sensor and can operate on all the information that those sensors are creating, in the right amount of time, we’re going to be stuck in the data age.

So that’s where heterogeneous computing really starts to change things. www.mil-embedded.com

And that’s why we’re seeing a growth in what we call two-and-a-half, 3D heterogeneous computing, where we’re really designing the processing capability to have the right performance be there at the sensor.

I’d say another key part of it, when you look at the radars and EW, is it solves the latency side of it. [Such as] how much time it takes to see the signal react and process it. So being able to process that information much earlier in the sensor chain than before increases the performance, but it also reduces the complexity of these systems as well. You’re going to see where we’re actually reducing overall costs and increasing performance at the same time and increasing reliability.

MIL-EMBEDDED: The space and military microelectronics market is a low-volume market. A lot of companies are able to leverage higher-volume commercial markets with their production lines to maybe drop the prices or component costs down for the military market. Mercury Systems is opening a new facility in Arizona to focus on this technology. Is that something you will leverage in the new facility or is the focus still going to be mostly military as with other parts of Mercury Systems?

SMELKER: Defense is the focus for Mercury, and we’ll maintain our focus on defense, but we are very focused on partnerships with the semiconductor industry. I would say the semiconductor industry is great at the low-mix, high-volume markets. And we’re really good at the high-mix, low-volume markets and being able to take in unique requirements, unique use-case requirements from the radars and EW systems, that we [previously mentioned], and being able to tweak that for [those] specific systems.

So, we’re going to continue to stay focused on the defense market, but if there’s opportunities that are low-volume, high-mix, that Mercury can support a customer in, obviously we’ll support that.

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June 2020 15

PERSPECTIVES

Executive Interview

MIL-EMBEDDED: Is it safe to say, too, that Mercury Systems is sourcing from some of those higher-volume commercial semiconductor markets? Would this also help the price point?

SMELKER: Yes, absolutely. It’s funny because of Moore’s law; the potential end of Moore’s law is almost like talking politics to some people: You don’t do it in mixed company sometimes.

the transistor and have the doubling of capabilities every 18 months, [which is] the trajectory we’re on. But if you actually read his white paper on this, the last page of it talks about where we’re going today. It’s all about heterogeneous computing, rightsizing the capability for the system itself. For instance, for the last 20 years, we really were trying to solve performance increases by putting more and more capabilities within the same silicon, adding processors, adding more memories, adding more interfaces, bringing in functionality that used to be on the board into the silicon. So what it did, was it grew the size of the silicon.

It grew the design cycle costs, extended the design cycles, increased the cost of the design cycles, and increased the cost of testing and verification. But then it also reduced yields, because now you have much more complex, larger devices.

There’s a buzz that Moore’s law is dead. You see the slowing of innovation in the semiconductor industry and that’s really not true. If you look at what Gordon Moore mentioned, he said at one point that it will not be cost-effective to continue to shrink

[As for] where we’re going now, you don’t need the memories to be at the same technology node as the processor.

SMELKER: It will. It definitely helps the price point, and so we will see the price point for semiconductor electronics go down. But at the same time, you’re going to see the requirements and demand for more performance and more innovation in those semiconductor components increase as we move those components to the sensor edge.

Unique requirements are going to come out of that which will drive a lot of innovation into the microelectronics [arena]. I’d say the microelectronics are not going to get simpler for moving to the sensor edge, but they’re going to get smaller and be very focused on size, weight, and power. But they will also have increased capabilities to process the information.

MIL-EMBEDDED: Speaking of complexity, at the Embedded Tech Trends Conference this winter, you gave a presentation talking about the end of Moore’s law. Now that might be good news for some people, but bad news for other people.

Can you talk a little bit about that concept and how it impacts the military market?

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You don’t need the interfaces to be at the same technology node as the processor as well. When you start designing chiplets that can handle, say, the memory, at a much older technology node or some analog to digital interface at a different technology node than the processor or FPGA [field-programmable gate array], you start to be able to really create all these chiplets and chips that programs can design unique solutions for and rightsize the processing capability. It’s actually a very exciting time to be in the microelectronics business and see how this is revolutionizing how our everyday life is changing, both militarily and commercially.

MIL-EMBEDDED: We talked about innovation. We talked about what’s going on in space and in the military.

Don’t limit yourself to that market for this question: What would be a game changer in the microelectronics world, let’s say, five to 10 years out?

Predict the future.

SMELKER: I would say what’s going to really change the market and drive the

www.mil-embedded.com

market is artificial intelligence (AI). And if you look at it, AI is going to leverage the heterogeneous capabilities that were designed today, because now we can rightsize those AI algorithms to process that data at the sensor edge that those algorithms will be tuned for. So, you’re going to see a growth in heterogeneous computing over the next five years, but where that will also lead you to is, today, we are processing architectures based on Von Neumann’s processing architecture. And where AI wants to go and where AI will push it is neuromorphic processing, and there’s a lot of investment going on in neuromorphic processing. Heterogeneous computing, by the way, is how neuromorphics are going to be integrated. AI is going to be that push.

So you’re going to see over the next five to 10 years capabilities in processing sensor information, both in military [applications] and in your home, your car, you name it, just take off. That’s going to drive the new processing architectures and change everything. You’re going to see smart sensors absolutely everywhere. If you look beyond 10 years, where’s that going? There are innovations being made today in quantum.

Obviously, we’re not there. Are we going to be there in 10 years? Probably not, but we’ll have made some great progress. But 20 years from now, 30 years from now, it will be a completely different world. MES Tom Smelker is vice president and general manager of custom microelectronic solutions at Mercury Systems Custom Microelectronic Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona.

Prior to joining Mercury, Smelker spent nearly 20 years as a Senior Engineering Fellow and systems design program manager at Raytheon Missile Systems. Smelker began his career as an Undergraduate and Graduate Fellow at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

Mercury Systems www.mrcy.com

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June 2020 17

SPECIAL REPORT

New era of space-based computing is underway

By Sally Cole, Senior Editor It’s happening: Space-based computing that can enable artificial intelligence, data analytics, cloud networking, and advanced satellite communications within a softwaredefined satellite architecture.

Small satellites, or small sats, are changing how commercial and military satellite providers view space procurement.

Typically deployed in low Earth orbit (LEO) in constellations that range in size from 10 to as many as 1,000 satellites, these appeal to many commercial communications suppliers due to their lower price points and faster deployments.

However, small sats also appeal to military users who want to get technology in orbit faster to take advantage of stateof-the-art technology and keep up with adversaries’ evolving threats.

Small Sats

The Pony Express-1 mission is a hosted payload on Tyvak-0129, a next-generation Tyvak 6U spacecraft. Courtesy of Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems Inc.

you can pack into a small payload,” says Mike Drews, Pony Express program manager for Lockheed Martin (Denver, Colorado).

In January 2020, Lockheed Martin launched the Pony Express-1, a hosted payload the size of a shoebox carrying new hardware and software to validate for space-based computing. The satellite – developed, built, and integrated within nine months – is funded by Lockheed Martin Research and Development.

For these small sats, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products, including militarygrade components, can be used: “For shorter missions, we’re even using hardware that isn’t radiation-hardened to accelerate the mission design and development lifecycle,” Drews points out. “This lets us use newer, more advanced technologies that haven’t been used in space before. And it means we can design and integrate something within months instead of years.”

The Pony Express dual-use payload is designed to enable space mesh networks through HiveStar technology, as well as to test space-to-ground remote sensing. The small sat also features several interesting new capabilities, including 3D-printed structures, multicore processing, large-scale data storage, and small-SWaP [size, weight, and power] electric propulsion, Drews says. (Figure 1.)

Figure 1

While size is an advantage with small sats, it also creates challenges concerning how much capability you can pack into these small spacecraft.

“The biggest challenge with small sats is size – you’re limited by how many sensors, processors, and the amount of power

18 June 2020

A technician working on The Pony Express-1 mission payload for the Tyvak-0129, a next-generation Tyvak 6U spacecraft. Courtesy of Lockheed Martin.

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A58_MilEmbSys_2_125x10.qxp_Layout 1 4/24/20

While size is an advantage with small sats, it also creates challenges concerning how much capability you can pack into these small spacecraft.

Space mesh networks If you’re familiar with Internet of Things (IoT) mesh networks, a space mesh network is the same concept – but in orbit. “Space mesh networking seeks to have all of the orbital devices talk to each other automatically,” Drews says.

This connectivity produces a globe-spanning network that enables new opportunities for sending commands and applications to satellites. “Mesh networking essentially turns every device into an always-on internet node,” he explains. “The other benefit is that it ensures better access to Earth without forcing flybys of specific ground stations.

Command and control and data movement becomes transparent.”

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Size does matter!

One of the complexities involved is the physics of closing communications links between satellites at orbital distance scales. “Right now, because this concept is new, not everything is always connected,” Drews notes. “In the future, hopefully it will be ‘always connected’ with more nodes and coverage. Another way to think of this is that the satellite is self-aware of its network status and can momentarily store and forward data until the satellite becomes connected again.”

SURFACE MOUNT

Pony Express acts as a local mesh network, whereas other long-range mesh networks provide connectivity between orbits (geosynchronous to medium Earth orbit, Earth to LEO, etc.).

QPL UNITS STANDARD

Software for smart satellites: Unlocking greater processing power HiveStar software enables systems to “interlink satellites and their applications to distribute software capabilities seamlessly across a constellation of satellites,” Drews explains. “It’s a software-based mission architecture that provides distributed cloud processing, task distribution, and autonomous operations.”

It can take advantage of sensors aboard other smart satellites to customize missions in ways that were previously challenging to do in space.

One of Hivestar’s key features is an event-based distributed application model that includes completely specified missions, executing on demand, autonomously – to find resources, perform tasks, and send results where needed. “Missions defined by applications can be easily uploaded to the satellite, similar to how you would download a new app to your phone from an app store,” Drews points out.

SmartSat: Software-defined satellite architecture SmartSat provides the infrastructure framework for common elements that don’t need to be redeveloped every time. It uses a high-power radiation-hardened computer developed by the National Science Foundation’s Center for Space, High-Performance, and Resilient Computing.

“By eliminating the development time, we think it will reduce the cost of satellites long-term,” Drews says. “Think about it from a mission-perspective: If you can build one satellite that does multiple missions instead of launching multiple satellites, it’s a huge cost savings.”

SmartSat takes advantage of multicore processing – which is new to space – to let satellites process more data in orbit so they can beam down just the most critical and relevant information needed. This maneuver saves bandwidth, reduces the burden www.mil-embedded.com

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June 2020 19

SPECIAL REPORT on ground-station analysts, and may help open the door to data centers in space.

(Figure 2.)

For security, “SmartSat uses a variety of advanced techniques to ensure satellites are cyber hardened,” says Adam Johnson, SmartSat program director for Lockheed Martin. “This includes software- and hardware-based intrusion detection, secure coding, encryption, and identity management.”SmartSat relies on a hypervisor to securely containerize virtual machines. This setup enables a single computer to operate multiple servers virtually to maximize memory, onboard processing, and network bandwidth.

Small Sats are still a nascent, cutting-edge technology. They’re tiny RF reprogrammable boxes with multicore processors to suit evolving mission needs.”

An SDR enables high-bandwidth hosting of multiple RF applications, the ability to store and forward RF collection, data compression, digital signal processing, and waveform transmission.

Lockheed Martin’s Space Cyber Engineering team was involved in SmartSat development right from the start. It’s “unique because it’s designed to have significant onorbit reprogrammability and autonomy,” Johnson adds. “The built-in flexibility also allows for more responsive security needs as they evolve. We can now deploy, update, patch, install, reconfigure, and remove systems and applications while the system is in flight. As the threat landscape evolves and new attack patterns emerge, SmartSat can be updated to proactively defend against new threats: this is huge.”

Upcoming research missions, including like Pony Express-2, will further advance cloud networking concepts among satellites, as well as validate Lockheed Martin’s SmartSat software-defined satellite architecture, which enables streamlined hosting of flexible mission apps.

Additionally, the SmartSat team made it harder to hack the satellite: “Communications with satellites are protected by cryptography – which is a strong control but by no means the only control,” Johnson says. “Relying on a single control against a persistent attacker would provide little to no protection once a breach has occurred.

Concepts like a ‘zero-trust’ approach, defendable architectures, evolved computer network defense, and endpoint security are some of the ways we secure our systems, including SmartSat. We also use DevSecOps secure coding to ensure software is being developed securely throughout the development life cycle.”

Pony Express-2 consists of two 12U CubeSats with faster, more capable, ultrascale processors to unlock inorbit data analytics and artificial intelligence. Lockheed Martin says that Pony Express-2 – equipped with miniaturized cross-link and precision timing – will be a trailblazer for autonomous teaming in space and true cloud networking.

Software-defined radio Pony Express is using a software-defined radio (SDR), a technology commonly used by the military (which isn’t new to space), but “the Moore’s law curve is making them significantly more capable,” Drews says. “It’s only been a few years since they’ve been capable enough to use on micro/small satellites. Software-defined radios

Follow-on Pony Express missions will seek to test and prove out RF-enabled swarming formations and space-to-space networking. MES

Figure 2

SmartSat uses multicore processing, a newcomer to the space arena. Courtesy of Lockheed Martin.

20 June 2020

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SATELLITE LIFE-EXTENSION SERVICE VIA ROBOT? The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA – Arlington, Virginia) is working with SpaceLogistics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman (Dulles, Virginia), to bring retired satellites back to life via robot.

What if it was possible to refuel or repair satellites in orbit?

Healthy, otherwise operational satellites get retired when they run out of fuel, which is undesirable for many reasons.

To counter this reality, DARPA has been exploring ways to give satellites a second life via a helpful visit from a robot, and has now chosen SpaceLogistics as its commercial partner for its Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) Program.

“The new robotics technology on this mission advances our vision to build a fleet of satellite servicing vehicles that provide customers with a variety of options to select the type of life-extension or in-orbit repairs they need,” says Tom Wilson, president of SpaceLogistics.

The goal of this project is to create a dexterous robot that can operate within geosynchronous orbit to help extend satellite lifespans, enhance resilience, and improve the reliability of current U.S. space infrastructure “The RSGS program has made steady progress since initiation in 2016,” says Joseph Parrish, program manager for RSGS in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “Completion of the payload critical design review in the summer of 2019 and delivery of key flight hardware items such as the manipulator arm keeps us on course for launch, targeted in 2023. RSGS would be the first concrete step toward a transformed space architecture with revolutionary capabilities.”

Under the agreement, DARPA is providing the robotics payload for the Space Logistics Mission Robotic Vehicle.

This payload, which was developed and integrated by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, consists of two dexterous robotic manipulator arms, as well as several tools and sensors. (See figure below.)

SpaceLogistics is providing its Mission Robotic Vehicle busleveraging technologies, developed for the industry’s first satellite-servicing vehicle, the Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV).

Northrop Grumman designed and built MEV-1 to dock with geostationary satellites whose fuel is nearly depleted.

Following its launch in October 2019, in February 2020 MEV-1 completed the first docking in geosynchronous orbit with an Intelsat satellite – successfully aligning while moving at a rate of 7,000 mph.

Beyond the Mission Robotic Vehicle for SpaceLogistics, Northrop Grumman is working to develop expanded lifeextension services for the mission that include “mission extension pods.” These new pods will augment the propulsion system of aging satellites and provide six more years of orbital life. The Mission Robotic Vehicle will be used to install these augmentation platforms on their existing inorbit commercial and government client satellites to extend their mission lives, according to Northrop Grumman.

Robotic servicing of satellites could become available within a few years: After a checkout and demonstration period, SpaceLogistics plans to offer commercial servicing to both government and commercial client spacecraft.

The Mission Robotic Vehicle, shown with DARPA’s RSGS Robotic Payload, is pioneering robotic servicing of satellites (artist rendering courtesy of Northrop Grumman). www.mil-embedded.com

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MIL TECH TRENDS

Tackling the AI paradox at the tactical edge

By Emma Helfrich, Associate Editor

Artificial intelligence (AI), as the general public understands it, is frequently associated with alluring – and sometimes alarming – ideas of talking robots, champion chess-playing computers, and sentient technology humans shouldn’t trust. In the defense industry, however, AI is on the path to becoming a loyal companion to the warfighter and manufacturers alike.

As technology progresses, so does the range of defense capabilities that AI could not only supplement, but eventually manage.

22 June 2020

Enabling Artificial Intelligence in Military Systems

Artificial intelligence – which we humans have chummily shortened to AI – is everywhere. Facial recognition on your phone, predictive technology used

by Netflix, Amazon’s Alexa: all of these capabilities are powered by machine learning. These technologies aren’t necessarily as enticing as Hollywood makes AI out to be, but they do exert a major influence on the direction of military AI. The way that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) treats both the discussion and utilization of AI depends heavily on the definition of it, which can be subjective. This ties in with what industry professionals have dubbed the AI Paradox: As soon as a capability has been proven to work, it’s no longer considered AI. Autopilot and fly-by-wire aircraft both use AI but are hardly ever regarded as such. Today, autopilot is thought of as its own capability, with fly-by-wire also its own separate thing. What results is a skewed perception of just how many platforms in the military take advantage of AI and machine learning in day-today operations.

What this paradox could also be translated into is simply an integration of AI so seamless that an entirely new capability is now at the military’s disposal.

With these advancements, however, come design obstacles that manufacturers face when considering processing power, environment, funding, and the commercial world.

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Figure 1

U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command graphic depicting the use of AI and humanmachine teaming on the battlefield.

making. It’s reasoning about what it’s seeing, it’s learning what it’s doing so it doesn’t make the same mistakes,” says Karen Haigh, chief technologist at Mercury Systems (Andover, Massachusetts).

While AI is often thought of with futuristic idealization, the reality is that it has been utilized by the DoD for decades, according to Haigh. In 1989, “A Plan for the Application of Artificial Intelligence to DoD Logistics” was published, citing initiatives for AI adoption that began in the late 1950s, even earlier than the plan’s publication.

What defines military AI In order to understand where military AI has been/is going, let’s actually define AI. AI and autonomy, commonly referred to in the same vein, are not quite synonymous. AI is what is needed to enable autonomy, as without it a machine couldn’t become fully autonomous. That being said, AI itself is similarly defined by a specific set of characteristics.

Industry experts maintain that there are four main components that make up an AI system (Figure 1): Situation assessment to understand its environment, the planning loop to decide what goals it wants to achieve and how to handle any tradeoffs, monitoring to make sure everything is being executed correctly, and a learning module that examines prior experience to update the model and avoid shortcomings.

“AI is a system that is interacting with its environment, doing iterative decisionwww.mil-embedded.com

This 30-year old proposition discussed the concept of predictive maintenance, a capability the military is widely using today. Using AI to bolster military logistics is arguably the most common use of machine learning in modern-day DoD operations. However, this plan also claimed that implementation would be a done deal by 1992; this longgone date highlights the gradual nature of AI acquisition in the military.

The best way to map out the history of military AI and its growth in an easily digestible way is to line it up with commercial AI advancements. Commercial AI is booming because capabilities powered by AI already exist in data-rich, significantly less-contested environments than that of theaters of war. Therefore, military AI has required more time and engineering capacity to widely adopt.

“We’re in an interesting situation in terms of the transposition of who’s leading the tech,” says Tammy Carter, senior product manager at Curtiss-Wright (Davidson, North Carolina) “You can see that now when graphics processing units (GPUs) come out and they’re available in the commercial world for at least a year, maybe two, before they get into the embedded space because they have to be hardened, et cetera. So right now, we’re a generation behind for most GPUs because of the ruggedness of them.”

The current state of military AI Dr. Tien Pham, chief scientist of the computational and information sciences directorate, U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, asserts that military AI is and has always been driven by the commercial sector. This claim ties right back into the advantage that commercial AI has by existing in environments with generous amounts of data available for use.

Predictive analysis using open-source intelligence is an AI-powered capability that has proven successful in the commercial sector because of the data-rich environments.

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Enabling Artificial Intelligence in Military Systems

Could it be just as beneficial for defense if military-relevant data wasn’t so scarce?

While this situation presents an engineering obstacle, it in no way has halted progress: “We can see increasing innovations in algorithms and computing resources for AI in complex data environments, AI for resource-constrained processing at the point-ofneed, AI with limited training data, and generalizable and predictable AI,” Pham says.

Predictive maintenance is finally starting to make the strides that the DoD hoped it would in 1992. Intended to replace scheduled maintenance – a process that ensures all aspects of a platform are being routinely serviced but often results in costly sometimes unnecessary labor – predictive maintenance would streamline the control loop.

Switching from schedule-based maintenance to AI-powered, condition-based maintenance could very well be implemented in the near future.

“With machine learning, you can start doing things like putting sensors on platforms like vibration sensors that would tell you how much the rotor is vibrating on the platform, and too much vibration would tell you that something may not be in good shape,” says David Jedynak, chief technology officer at Curtiss-Wright (Austin, Texas).

“Then you could take those sensors and train a machine learning-based format to know what a good helicopter looks like from a sensor standpoint and maybe even train it to know what some faults look like.” (Figure 2.)

Saving time, money, and lives is the goal of the greater adoption of military AI. Whether an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) executing a beyond-line-of-sight operation to detect a possible improvised explosive device (IED), or an algorithm that could analyze an image and detect something a human couldn’t, military AI manufacturers hope to use this technology to better augment military procedures. Standing in the way of this progress, say manufacturers, is adequate processing power and the means to achieve it.

Where military AI hopes to go Collecting large amounts of rich data is something that AI has proven to do well, but one barrier to wider adoption is the processing power required to transmit that data in an efficient way.

“When you’re collecting imagery, video, or large swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum, you want to be able to do something with that as quickly as possible,” says Shaun McQuaid, director of product management at Mercury Systems (Figure 3).

“That’s where I think having the capability to deploy these kinds of AI and machine learning applications on the platform comes into play. Without that capability, you don’t have the ability to do anything with those large data sets in real time. That, I think, is the advantage that the modern architectures that support machine learning and AI platforms bring to the folks who are utilizing them.”

Figure 2 | Curtiss-Wright’s family of rugged mission computers support GPU acceleration (and some also deep learning acceleration) to empower embedded machine learning capabilities. Shown is the Jetson TX2i-based Parvus DuraCOR 312.

Figure 3 | The composable data center (cloud) is comprised of powerful scalable CPUs, GPGPU coprocessors (both now with AI hardware acceleration), fast storage, wideband fabrics (PCIe), and I/O. Mercury aims to mirror this architecture for embedding into applications with our OpenVPX high performance embedded edge computing (HPEEC) solution like the SFM6126.

machine learning capability that military AI manufacturers are trying to sharpen.

According to Haigh, there remains a lot of data that the military isn’t processing terribly effectively.

“The algorithms are usually trained on the bigger boxes because there’s so much data and you need so much processing to learn the algorithm,” Carter says. “But when you’re actually going to implement it, you take the algorithm you developed, or the code and the programs, translate, and cut it down so it can actually run on these smaller devices.”

“We can do sonar data, radio frequency data, or image data, but we are not terribly good at stitching those concepts together,” Haigh says. “For example, say you had a counter-UAS system at an airport, can you stitch together the radio signals and radar signals along with a camera image from all around and not just from the central station? Can you stitch all of that together to gather if there is an actual drone threat at that airport? We don’t have that stitching yet, but we’ll get there. Every year we take another step up the ladder in terms of the complexity and richness of the data we can pull together.”

Stitching – or persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) where signal-processing and AI technologies are pulled together and joined – is another

What may stand in the way is the procurement process for AI services, which

Additionally, understanding this processing power from a size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) standpoint is just as important. Integrating machine learning capabilities onto a small unmanned aerial system (UAS), for example, requires a level of embedded computing expertise cognizant of the type of technology being put onto the platform, power consumption, and wattage among other factors.

24 June 2020

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is arduous. Currently, in order for the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) to begin the process of accelerating AI adoption and deployment, it must go through contract vehicles offered by various DoD organizations.

On this subject, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, director of the JAIC, has argued that the procurement process should become unilateral to quicken acquisitions.

The various approaches used in the procurement process is partially responsible for the gradual adoption of AI in the military, and may also partially explain why the AI that has been fielded generally executes lower-level tasks. The money isn’t quite where it needs to be to take bigger risks in development of AI technology, but manufacturers are hopeful that things will soon start to change.

than legacy capabilities, or competitive alternatives. Saying we need to devote a small amount of money to ‘AI-only’ acquisition is like saying we need to allocate a sum of money to ‘math-only’ or ‘physics-only’ acquisition.”

The progress, innovation, and DoD acknowledgement seem to be there. Selling AI as a concept is easy – the buzzword certainly is attention-grabbing – but pitching a nonphysical algorithm can be tricky. However, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to ignore just how pivotal AI will be for defense technology.

“DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Project Agency] and the JAIC have both received increased funding,” says John Hogan, director at BAE Systems Fast Labs (Lexington, Massachusetts). “And they have cast a wide net beyond traditional government contractors to ensure they capture innovation from the entire community.” MES

Funding the future “In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, there is an expectation that defense budgets will be impacted globally,” says Amir Husain, founder and CEO of Spark Cognition (Austin, Texas). “As a consequence, force levels could potentially decline, and therefore, there is a real need to maintain effectiveness and capability as these [AI] trends unfold.

Autonomy is one of the key innovative technologies that will be at the heart of the future force, not only due to competitive reasons but now also because of budget concerns.”

The DoD’s Third Offset Strategy, promulgated in 2014, has played a noteworthy role in the military’s switch from putting a monetary emphasis on legacy hardware like planes, ships, and tanks to concentrating on a more softwaredefined battlefield. The internal motivation spawns from a basic need to keep up with adversaries like China, and eventually develop a semblance of what Lt. Gen. Shanahan termed an “enterprise cloud solution.”

“AI is thought of as a product, with talk of AI-specific budgets. This makes sense for research projects, but not for the acquisition of production-level capability,” Husain says. “When you acquire a capability, you do so because it is better www.mil-embedded.com

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Enabling Artificial Intelligence in Military Systems

When will artificial general intelligence be ready for smart weapon and sensor systems?

By David Sherwood and Terry Higbee Modern sensors and weapon systems, particularly those associated with autonomous vehicles, will be required to make smart, trustworthy decisions in milliseconds. But is today’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology up to the task?

Current AI solutions can perform quite well at detecting patterns in data, but fall far short of understanding the meaning and relevance of those patterns in a way that resembles how humans understand information. Furthermore, today’s technology is computationally slow, brittle, and opaque; when the response is not right it can be catastrophically wrong and subsequently cannot explain how it arrived at the answer. Although AI systems are still quite far from human-like reasoning, recent developments in artificial general intelligence (AGI) are making enormous strides in the right direction. This reality will revolutionize sensors, weapon systems, and other defense embedded systems.

26 June 2020

Consider this hypothetical scenario: an autonomous sensor platform is patrolling a region of space not far from adversary platforms (Figure 1) and gathering intelligence. Suddenly, the autonomous sensor platform is hit by a shock wave.

Now some of its sensors are malfunctioning and its sensors are indicating a critically low battery level. If it does not return to base right away, the entire platform and its stored intelligence may be lost or fall into enemy hands.

Perhaps, the platform reasons, the malfunctioning sensors are the result of being struck by lightning. The platform must now decide whether to continue gathering intelligence according to the mission directive or return to base to protect the platform and the intelligence it has already collected. But there is nothing in its explicit programming to direct the platform how to respond to a situation exactly like this.

Fortunately, this is an intelligent platform that was designed to deal with unanticipated situations. It knows that if it stays the course, it might gather highly valuable intelligence. It also knows the platform itself has high value and should not be put at risk without high probability of collecting unusually high-value data. The platform reasons that to break this deadlock, it must better assess if the low-battery warning is real or a sensor malfunction. To resolve this dilemma, it turns on as many electronic devices as possible to deliberately increase the drain on the battery and loiters for a minute while closely monitoring the battery level, but the battery level doesn’t budge. After a minute the platform therefore

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representation that are now being applied to representing knowledge in an ANN. In this case, the information encoded using knowledge representation becomes analogous to a memory “engram” (a term used to describe a unit of cognitive information) in a person’s brain.

Figure 1

The essence of human intelligence is “generalization” and “abstraction.” New design strategies for knowledge representation embrace that view and design the “engrams” to promote strong generalization, not unlike the way that a communications engineer designs codes to support error correction.

Autonomous platforms will become increasingly dependent on artificial general intelligence. Image by Cognitive Science and Solutions.

There are signs, however, that recent developments

concludes that the battery sensor is most likely malfunctioning, and it continues to gather the much-needed intelligence.

in the design of knowledge

Autonomous platforms need strong artificial intelligence As autonomous platforms proliferate and the military environment becomes ever more complex and lethal, these platforms will have to negotiate with situations that their planners could not have anticipated and must be relied on to make quick decisions that are reasonable and explainable. Despite the amazing recent advances in AI, it is not clear that AI as we know it today is on a path towards providing machine intelligence that has the flexibility exhibited routinely by humans. What we need is artificial general intelligence (AGI).

neural networks (ANNs)

What is AGI? AGI is a relatively new term that recaptures what was originally (back in the 1950s) meant by artificial intelligence. Despite the enormous growth of computing power and increasing sophistication of algorithms in the past 60-plus years, very limited progress has been made towards computers that can understand, think, and reason in a way that resembles human information processing.

Although there is no universal agreement on the definition or measurement of AGI, today’s AI does not begin to understand, reason, or think. Today’s AI is often referred to as “weak” AI as opposed to the “strong” capability of AGI. There are signs, however, that recent developments in the design of knowledge representation for artificial neural networks (ANNs) may be opening the door to true AGI technology.

There is no escaping the basic fact that knowledge is power. AGI systems, regardless of their exact design, will need knowledge bases filled with mission-related information to succeed. We see this in our lives too: Children begin learning and filling their knowledge bases the day they are born. They learn by seeing, hearing, and touching the environment, together with years of learning from parents, friends, and teachers.

Similarly, AGI systems will be powered by deep knowledge bases.

Knowledge representation is key to AGI systems Decades ago, there were extensive efforts to develop knowledge representations for AI systems. Today we are seeing innovative new techniques for knowledge www.mil-embedded.com

representation for artificial

may be opening the door to true AGI technology.

Key technical features of AGI systems AGI systems will employ knowledge generalization to provide capabilities including: › Inferencing: AGI systems will have a robust capability to retrieve information from its knowledge base, which is conceptually related to the current state, and then decide how best to respond to the current situation based on extensive knowledge of similar situations and those outcomes. › Mechanisms to “focus” knowledge retrieval: AGI systems will focus their retrieval and processing logic on those attributes most relevant to the priorities of the current situation. For example, deciding how to maximize the value of the intelligence being collected is not the best way to use its inferencing capabilities when the platform is on fire.

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› General model-based reasoning: Many embedded systems today possess brilliant but weak intelligence (in the AI sense of “weak”). These systems are often a mix of smart subsystems that talk through well-defined APIs. In contrast, an AGI system does not have to be spoon-fed its inputs through such APIs but can handle unstructured data from a webpage, a document, or a new subsystem and make the connections between that information and its internal models through conceptual generalization. This is an entirely different and much more powerful way of thinking about “variable binding” in computer systems.

State of the art in AGI It’s difficult to know the exact state of the art today because most organizations in the AI community have decided to focus on the much more tractable problem of weak AI. But in recent years some organizations have shown signs of success. We estimate that if human-level intelligence is the top rung on a ladder with, for instance, 10 rungs, today’s

top AGI technology is probably on about the second or third rung.

Humans still have an enormous advantage over AGI systems and will maintain that advantage for many years: › Humans not only possess much larger knowledge bases than anything we can construct today, but human knowledge is a more comprehensive description of the physical world. › Humans also have more comprehensive capabilities for “data cleansing” and dealing with inconsistent and unreliable data.

AGI systems, on the other hand, may have the following advantages: › Much faster processing time (especially when using dedicated hardware accelerator chips). › Retrieving data from the knowledge base does not corrupt the data as it does with humans. (Humans modify engrams as they recall them.)

Research and development conducted over many years has demonstrated that a systematic approach to knowledge representation for ANNs provides a solid foundation for AGI. Now that progress in AGI is beginning to surge, can we expect to see funding made available to further expand progress in this key technology? MES David Sherwood, the founder of Cognitive Science and Solutions, is an EW systems engineer with decades of experience in digital signal processing and neural networks. Readers may reach him at david.sherwood@CogSciSol.com.

Dr. Terry Higbee, the cofounder and CTO of Cognitive Science and Solutions, has a Ph.D. from Stanford University and more than five decades of experience in computer architecture, signal processing, algorithm development, and cybersecurity. Email the author at terry.higbee@cogscisol.com.

Cognitive Science & Solutions www.cogscisol.com

28 June 2020

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INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

LEO EO/IR/SAR Data Processing & ATR Astronaut Robotic Assistant & Health Management Constellation Management & Collision Avoidance Communication Network Reconfiguration/Optimization Planet/Comet/Asteroid Identification & Tracking Internet of Space Things Weather Monitoring & Prediction Natural Disaster Monitoring, Warning, & Impact Analysis Autonomous Emergency First Response

Enabling COTS in Space Electronics Systems

On Earth Data Processing Planet/Comet/Asteroid Identification & Tracking Constellation Management & Collision Avoidance Weather Monitoring & Prediction Natural Disaster Monitoring, Warning, & Impact Analysis Autonomous Emergency First Response

Moon Mineral/Mining Mapping & Site Identification Swarm Drone Management & Optimization Early Warning Threat Detection (Gateway) Lunar Station/Base Power Optimization & Management

LEO

GEO

Stratosphere EO/IR/SAR Data Processing Communication Network Gap Enablement Weather Monitoring & Prediction Natural Disaster Monitoring, Warning, & Impact Analysis

Title Why space

By John McHale, Editorial Director needs artificial intelligence

MEO

MEO Methane Super Emitter Tracking Internet of Space Things Collision Avoidance Autonomous Emergency First Response

Route to Mars Solar/Cosmic Radiation Detection Autonomous Navigation/Course Correction Communication Network Reconfiguration/Optimization

GEO Smart Adaptive Comms Solar Flare & GRB Monitoring & Notification Weather Monitoring & Prediction Natural Disaster Monitoring, Warning, & Impact Analysis Autonomous Emergency First Response Early Warning Threat Detection

caption

The GSI Technology project to work with other companies to bring novel computing architectures to mission-critical space systems is called FRACTALS [Fault tolerant and Resilient Associative Computing for Artificial inteLligence in Space]. GSI Technology illustration.

abstract

By Paul Armijo and George Williams

The modern-day revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) is fueled by neural networks, a concept that dates back to the 1950s; this concept has surged in the last decade under its new, much improved, guise called deep learning. Deep learning is empowering systems with unrivaled abilities to perceive their environments The visually and to make sense of human language through voice or text. But what do face recognition in family photos or customer-service chatbots have to do with advanced space tech and military intelligence-gathering? Quite a bit, it turns out, and the common denominator is data.

30 June 2020

Deep learning can consume massive amounts of data and distill all of it into compact machine learning models. When deployed, these trained models can be used for a myriad of tasks here on Earth: object recognition, language understanding, predictive analytics, even complex decision-making. In space, these models can perform similar roles as they process massive amounts of sensor data to gather and interpret intelligence, predict mission-critical events, facilitate human-computer interaction, and empower local-vehicle autonomy.

From Earth to Mars ‌ and beyond As artificial intelligence (AI) is added to missions, more and more Earth observational (EO) data will be processed on board instead of sent down to Earth.

This evolution toward increased AI will take many years. In the meantime, thousands of satellites will continue beaming data back to the surface until end of life. This reality means that we still need to build advanced high-performance computing (HPC) systems here on the ground that use smarter, power-efficient algorithms to crunch all that data. We will need AI to process multispectral imagery not just over space, but over time. This kind of analysis is critical for improved weather forecasting and real-time disaster awareness, as well as justin-time first response. We can leverage AI not only to protect people against natural disasters, but also against human-made ones. A tremendous amount of space junk is hovering right above us, and we can use AI to predict when and where the most dangerous ones will make landfall.

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orbit, with many more on their way. With thousands of satellites at nearly the same altitude and little traffic control, we will need AI to predict possible collisions and to enact appropriate countermeasures. The newer small satellite “constellations” are tightly interconnected in order to service a new global internet; all of these will need highly adaptive AI-based algorithms to reliably route traffic within this highly challenging topology. At LEO, we also encounter the first humans who will live in space for long periods of time. AI has a clear role to play in this realm as personal assistants: not just robotics, but as emotionally aware companions for the long haul. (Figure 1.)

Mars Autonomous Exploration & Weather Prediction Mars Space Network Management & Optimization Swarm Drone Management & Optimization Mars Station/Base Power Optimization & Management

Figure 1

Route to Deep Space Adaptive Propulsion Extreme Data Compression Deep Space Network Data Optimization

With thousands of satellites flying at nearly the same altitude and with little traffic control, we will need artificial intelligence to predict possible collisions and to enact appropriate countermeasures.

FRACTALS is a Program between GSI Technology and SHREC.

Vehicles that operate at the topmost layer of the atmosphere – known as pseudosatellites – take the form of high-altitude balloons or drones. They have a variety of uses: military intelligence-gathering, maritime monitoring and surveillance, environmental observation, climate prediction, and border patrol.

These vehicles collect a huge amount of heterogeneous data, so there is a pressing need to fuse all this raw data and process it all on board. AI can help in this instance, thus avoiding costly transmission of data to the ground. These pseudo-satellites can remain airborne for long periods of time, running on solar energy. Giving these vehicles the ability to make navigation decisions locally could be key for completing even longer-term missions autonomously.

At low Earth orbit (LEO), we start to encounter our first real satellites. LEO is a very busy place these days: A record number of small satellites have been launched in the last few years at low www.mil-embedded.com

As LEO fills up, new satellites will start to populate the medium Earth orbit (MEO) lanes.

AI will be needed at this distance for collision avoidance and autonomous countermeasures. The cost of transmitting sensor data at MEO becomes even more expensive in terms of power and time, so local AI-based data processing is even more important at this distance. At geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO), on-board processing is critical. The satellites at this distance not only observe Earth activity but also watch solar flare activity as well as cosmic-ray events such as gamma-ray bursts. Because these phenomena can be dangerous to activities here on Earth, improving the detection and recognition capabilities through AI will improve the related early-warning systems.

Deleterious climate change on Earth has been linked to the aggressive depletion and consumption of natural resources. The moon seems an incredibly large untapped resource, but it remains unknown precisely what resources lie underneath its dusty surface and where those resources live. AI has been used here on Earth to predict and locate underground reserves of oil and minerals, and it will be an invaluable tool for doing the same on the moon. The continued exploration of the moon needs to scale beyond current efforts, which now require roundtrip communications to the Earth.

New exploratory missions will utilize swarms of autonomous drones that will require AI-based sensor processing and local navigation decision-making.

Vehicles en route to Mars must be quite sophisticated to be completely autonomous.

The trip is dangerous and future missions will require immediate adaptation to potential impairments, such as solar and cosmic radiation bursts and even object collisions.

AI could be employed to not only predict such events, but also to make emergency corrective navigational maneuvers.

The exploration of Mars, much like that of the moon, cannot scale given the current approach – slow-moving rovers that are predominantly remote-controlled from the Earth. The new army of proposed exploratory drones is autonomous and AI-driven; they are intended to navigate on their own, balancing risk-versus-reward decisions at every

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Enabling COTS in Space Electronics Systems

turn. When humans eventually make their homes on Mars, their environments must be completely controlled by smart algorithms that control every aspect of life support.

As missions move beyond Mars to other planets, and beyond the solar system, there must be a balance of storing data and transmitting it back to Earth in the right amounts.

Onboard data processing will help, but data will also need to be compressed aggressively between transmission windows. AI-based compression has been shown to be effective and could be also used in the far reaches of space where it is needed the most.

Going forward The modern-day democratization of AI and machine learning has sparked nothing short of a revolution. Organizations everywhere are rethinking their product and research strategy at all levels of the technology stack – from silicon to software to applications. The one-two punch of both open research and open source has created an unprecedented

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When engineers need resistors for critical missions in a no-replace environment like Mars, they choose State of the Art. We are aboard three Mars orbiters: Odyssey, MRO, and Maven. We are aboard four rovers: Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, with another rover to be launched in 2020. And we are aboard the InSight lander that is studying the interior of the planet. Working toward a manned mission to Mars, NASA chose State of the Art resistors. Whose resistors will you choose for next mission?

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availability of these state-of-the AI algorithms, and new hardware that now accelerates AI has become a commodity.

That is the situation here on Earth. As we go farther from the planet’s surface, the varied radiation-imbued environments create significant challenges for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, necessitating highly custom implementations.

The goal: To create modular and costeffective computing systems for all spacerelated efforts, from ground-based HPC data centers to deep-solar-system exploration missions. We are committed to the open nature of AI and we are welcoming collaborators to join this effort bringing novel computing architectures to mission-critical systems in space. The GSI Technology project is called FRACTALS [Fault tolerant and Resilient Associative Computing for Artificial inteLligence in Space] and has already announced its first partner, SHREC (NSF Center for Space, High-Performance, and Resilient Computing). MES Paul Armijo is the Director of Aerospace & Defense Business Sector at GSI Technology. Paul has had the privilege of leading numerous flagship programs and technology development efforts over his career to further enable the space community. Paul received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Arizona State University. He may be reached at parmijo@gsitechnology.com.

George Williams is Director of Computing and Data Science at GSI Technology.

He’s held senior leadership roles in software, data science, and research.

He is an author on several research papers in computer vision and deep learning. Readers may reach him at gwilliams@gsitechnology.com.

GSI Technology www.gsitechnology.com

32 June 2020

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INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

SpaceVPX and the world of interconnect

By C. Patrick Collier and Mike Walmsley

Open standards have been driving innovation more quickly to the end user in aerospace and defense applications for decades and now space systems are truly enbracing them. A perfect example is the SpaceVPX standard, which leverages the OpenVPX architecture through the interconnect solutions defined in VITA standards. This piece from SpaceVPX founder Patrick Collier and Michael Walmsley of TE Connectivity, the designers of the VPX and SpaceVPX interconnect, covers the basics of SpaceVPX, recent changes, and the importance of the standard interconnect, which drives down cost, results in a more robust supply chain, and maintains a path for future expansion.

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Enabling COTS in Space Electronics Systems

SpaceVPX, originally named The Next Generation Space Interconnect Standard [NGSIS), is a government-industry collaboration effort to define a set of standards for interconnects between space system components with the goal of cost effectively removing bandwidth as a constraint for future space systems. This effort builds on the VITA [VMEbus International Trade Association] OpenVPX standard and extends it for space applications.

The NGSIS team selected the OpenVPX standard family as the physical baseline for the new SpaceVPX standard because VPX supports both 3U and 6U form factors with ruggedized and conduction-cooled features suitable for use in extreme environments.

Built upon several standards that are part of the ANSI/VITA OpenVPX family, including the base VITA 46 VPX standard and its ANSI/VITA 65 OpenVPX derivative, SpaceVPX also allows other compatible connectors to be used, including ANSI/VITA 60 and 63. ANSI/VITA 48.2[3] forms the base of the mechanical extensions in SpaceVPX while ANSI/VITA 62 defines a standardized power module.

ANSI/VITA 66 and 67 also may be applied to replace electrical segments of the connector with RF or optical solutions. ANSI/VITA 46.11[4], currently in trial usage, provides a base of the management protocol that SpaceVPX builds upon for fault-tolerant management of the SpaceVPX system.

Organizing connections Four major interconnect planes organize the connections in OpenVPX – data, control, utility, and expansion. The data plane provides high speed multigigabit fabric connections between modules and typically carries payload and mission data. The control plane, also a fabric, typically has less capacity and is used

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were noticed. The biggest one was the lack of features that could support a full singlefault-tolerant and highly reliable configuration. Utility signals were bused and in most cases supported only one set of signals, via signal pins to a module. A pure OpenVPX system has opportunities for multiple failures, as a result.

Primary Subsystem

Power Module

Data In Module

Processing Module

Storage Module

Data Out Module

Controller Module

Control Switch Module

Data Switch Module

SpaceUM Module

SpaceUM Module

Data Switch Module

Control Switch Module

Controller Module

Data Out Module

Storage Module

Processing Module

Data In Module

Power Module

Basic SpaceVPX Payload Use Case

Secondary Subsystem

Figure 1 | SpaceVPX’s goal: To achieve an acceptable level of fault tolerance by way of redundancy and switching. Illustration: VITA.

A full management-control mechanism was also not fully defined with VITA 46.11. The fact that the typical OpenVPX control planes are PCI Express or Ethernet was another shortcoming of concern since their usage in space applications was minimal; moreover, SpaceWire is the dominant medium-speed data and control plane interface for most spacecraft. A third area was the desire to reuse the infrastructure of OpenVPX for prototyping and testing SpaceVPX on the ground. for configuration, setup, diagnostics, and other operational control functions within the payload as well as lowerspeed data transfers.

The utility plane’s function is to provide setup and control of the basic module functions that typically handle power sequencing and low-level diagnostics, as well as the power, clocks, and other base signals needed for system operation. The expansion plane may be used as a separate connection between modules using similar or bridging heritage interfaces in a more limited topology such as a bus or ring. Pins not defined as part of any of these planes are typically user-defined and are available for pass-through from daughter or mezzanine cards or to rear transition modules (RTM). For maximum module reuse, the user-defined pins should be configurable so as not to interfere with modules that use these pins in a different way; consult ANSI/VITA 65 for more detail.

Major changes in SpaceVPX In evaluating the use of OpenVPX for potential space usage, several shortcomings www.mil-embedded.com

Mission: Fault tolerance The goal of SpaceVPX is to achieve an acceptable level of fault tolerance, while maintaining a reasonable level of compatibility with existing OpenVPX components – this includes connector-pin assignments for the board and the backplane (Figure 1.) For the purposes of fault tolerance, a module (defined as a printed wire assembly which conforms to defined mechanical and electrical specifications) is considered the minimum redundancy element. The utility plane and control plane within SpaceVPX are all distributed redundantly, and are arranged in star topologies to provide fault tolerance to the entire system.

Meeting that level of fault tolerance required the utility plane signals to be dualredundant and then switched to each SpaceVPX card function. A trade study was performed early to compare between various implementations including adding the switching to each card in various ways as well as creating a unique switching card. The latter approach was chosen so that SpaceVPX cards could each receive the same utility plane signals that an OpenVPX card receives with minor adjustments for any changes in topology. This became known as the Space Utility Management (SpaceUM) module and is a major contribution of the standard.

The SpaceUM module contains as many as eight sets of power and signal switches to support SpaceVPX modules. It receives one power bus from each of two power supplies and one set of utility plane signals from each of two system controller functions required in the SpaceVPX backplane. The various parts of the SpaceUM module are considered extensions of the power supply, system controller, and other SpaceVPX modules for reliability calculation and thus do not require their own redundancy.

Profiles for space defined Since each slot, module, and backplane profile in OpenVPX is fully defined and interlinked, the changes made for SpaceVPX require a SpaceVPX version of each of these

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INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

Enabling COTS in Space Electronics Systems

profiles to be specified. Specifically, the slot profiles provide a physical mapping of data ports onto the slots’ backplane connector, which is agnostic to the type of protocol used to convey data from the slot to the backplane.

The module profiles are extensions of their accompanying slot profiles that enable mapping of protocols to each module port. Each module profile includes information on thermal, power, and mechanical requirements. Many are very close to OpenVPX and thus should enable use of OpenVPX modules and backplanes for prototyping or testing but are different enough to require full specification. The section of the SpaceVPX standard that defines profiles was a significant effort and forms a majority of the completed standard.

SpaceVPX interconnects Interconnects are also a critical part of SpaceVPX and as with other elements of the standard are based on those interconnects developed for OpenVPX, but designed for the extreme space environment. For decades, designers for space applications used customized interconnect designs to ensure the reliability of embedded electronics exposed to the extremes of space. Problematic temperatures, vibration, outgassing, and other factors can catastrophically compromise interconnect systems and signal and power integrity. The high cost and long lead times of a custom interconnect solution were considered a worthwhile investment against failures that are either impossible to fix in space or extremely costly.

By leveraging the OpenVPX architecture, SpaceVPX brings in the interconnect solutions which are defined in VITA standards and have gone through extensive testing to support their use in space. The use of standard interconnects drives down cost, results in a more robust supply chain, and maintains a path for future expansion.

The SpaceVPX slot profiles define the use of VPX connectors (VITA 46 or alternate VPX connectors) and enable implementation of RF (VITA 67) and optical (VITA 66) modules at the plug-in module to backplane interface. Power supplies follow the VITA 62 standard, which also defines the power supply connector interface. For XMC mezzanine cards in plug-in modules, XMC 2.0 connectors per VITA 61 are recommended. SpaceVPX slot profiles pull in the appropriate VITA connector standards that support the OpenVPX architecture, rather than defining new connectors with special characteristics.

VITA 46 VPX connectors The original VPX interconnect is the VITA 46 VPX connector, based on TE Connectivity’s (TE’s) MULTIGIG RT 2 connector, and was released in the VITA 46 standard in 2006.

The MULTIGIG RT connector family gives designers an easy-to-implement, modular, standardized and cost-effective interconnect system that helps ensure the reliability of their embedded-computing applications for space systems. MULTIGIG RT connectors had been tested by TE and implemented in space applications before the origin of SpaceVPX. The MULTIGIG RT connectors have gone through extensive testing by TE to establish suitability for space, including: › Compliant (press-fit) pin technology: Testing has been performed by TE at min-max board hole sizes and different PCB [printed circuit board] platings to verify the reliability of the compliant pin designs. Today there are numerous space applications using compliant pin technology (versus the traditional soldered connections), and its implementation is growing. › Vibration: To address extreme vibration applications, the VITA 72 study group was formed and devised a vibration test that subjected a 6U VPX test unit to random vibration levels of 0.2 g2/Hz for 12 hours, a severe

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MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

requirement compared to the original VPX standard. TE’s MULTIGIG RT 2-R connector – featuring an enhanced quadredundant backplane connector contact system and rugged guide hardware – tested successfully as part of this effort and was released in 2013 for highly rugged applications. › Extreme temperature: MULTIGIG connectors were tested by TE to a temperature range of -55 ˚C to +105 ˚C when initially qualified for VPX in 2006, which met the VITA 47 standard for plug-in modules. In direct response to requirements from space-systems developers, MULTIGIG RT connectors have been tested and survived -55 °C to +125 °C, including exposure to 1,000 hours of heat at 125 °C and 100 thermal shock cycles from -55 °C to +125 °C. › Outgassing: Unlike heavy polymer plug-in module connectors used in conventional backplane connector designs, MULTIGIG RT connectors incorporate air gaps, so less polymer is needed. The polymer reduction not only reduces weight but also outgassing. With MULTIGIG RT connector materials, total mass loss (TML) is less than 1% and collected volatile condensable materials (CVCM) is less than 0.01%, which meets NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) outgassing requirements. › Current capacity: When VITA 78 was developed, there was a need for VPX connectors to support new pinouts (not defined in VITA 46) to support the requirements for redundant power distribution and redundant management distribution.

TE completed extensive testing for current carrying capability on multiple adjacent MULTIGIG power wafers within plug-in module connectors and also released new wafer configurations to support the VITA 78 Space Utility Management module architecture. www.mil-embedded.com

Space system designers use these MULTIGIG RT connectors with minimal or no physical change – depending on user requirements – to the design or materials and finishes. Higher lead content (40%) in the contact tails may be specified for increased tin-whisker mitigation; in many cases, additional screening tests are required based on the user or program requirement, but the connector-manufacturing processes are relatively the same, which helps improve availability and cost.

By leveraging the OpenVPX architecture, SpaceVPX can also leverage the OpenVPX interconnect roadmap, which addresses solutions having faster speeds, higher density, smaller size, and lighter weight.

RF and optical modules There are options to integrate RF and optical connector modules within an OpenVPX slot to carry signals through the backplane to/from the plug-in module.

These connector modules are mounted to the boards (including standard aperture cutouts on the backplane) to house multiple coaxial contacts or optical fibers and can replace select VITA 46 connectors within a slot. These RF and optical connector modules and contacts are compatible for space and have been implemented in satellite systems.

VITA 67 is the base standard for RF modules and are the initial standards defined in an SMPM RF interface for the contacts in VITA 67.1 and 67.2. An upcoming revision to the VITA 67.3 standard adds higher-density interfaces NanoRF and SMPS, which can increase the contact density two to three times over SMPM. VITA 66 is the base standard for optical modules, with MT ferrules as the primary optical interface between the plug-in module and backplane as defined in VITA 66.1 and 66.4 standards. With the emergence of a new VITA 66.5 standard, www.mil-embedded.com

higher-density modules are being defined featuring up to three MT interfaces in a half module, a significant increase in bandwidth density.

XMC connectors XMC mezzanine cards can be implemented on SpaceVPX plug-in modules to add I/O and other features. In the SpaceVPX standard, the recommended XMC connector is VITA 61 XMC 2.0, the standard based on TE’s Mezalok connector. The Mezalok connector features multiple points of contact per pin, supporting the redundancy desired for space application. It has also been tested to extreme environments – including 2000 thermal cycles from -55 ºC to +125 ºC with no solder joint failures – and meets outgassing requirements.

The roadmap for SpaceVPX interconnect By leveraging the OpenVPX architecture, SpaceVPX can also leverage the OpenVPX interconnect roadmap, which addresses solutions having faster speeds, higher density, smaller size, and lighter weight. There is significant activity with new and revised VITA standards to define technologies supporting next-generation embedded computing.

The upcoming revision to the VITA 67.3 standard introduces the higher-density RF interfaces NanoRF and SMPS, reducing size and weight – both of which are critical for space systems – and accommodating higher frequencies to 70 GHz. The VITA 66.5 standard is in development, documenting higher-density optical interfaces, bringing up to three MT interfaces into a half-module and enabling integration of a fixed edge-mount transceiver. In addition, VITA 66.5 provides solutions with NanoRF contacts and optical MTs integrated into a common connector module, providing unprecedented density within an OpenVPX slot.

New VITA 62 power supply standards are addressing higher input voltages (270 VDC) and three-phase power configurations. New MULTIBEAM XLE connectors from TE with isolating fins provide this upgrade for higher voltage levels while maintaining the same VITA 62 interface. MES C. Patrick Collier is open systems architect and systems engineer at Harris.

Patrick Collier focuses on the development and use of open architectures for both space and nonspace applications. Previously he was a lead hardware engineer at PMA-209 NAVAIR, where he focused on the development of the Hardware Open Systems Technology (HOST) set of standards. His first assignment was as a senior electrical research engineer with the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate. While at AFRL, he founded the Next Generation Space Interconnect Standard (NGSIS) with Raphael Some (NASA JPL). Patrick also founded and is currently chair for the VITA 78 (SpaceVPX) and VITA 78.1 (SpaceVPXLite) efforts.

He is also a cofounder of the Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) and chair of its Hardware Working Group. Additionally, he was a lead for the Space Universal Modular Architecture (SUMO), where he worked to incorporate existing spacerelated standards and architectures into SUMO. Michael Walmsley, global product manager for TE Connectivity, has more than 35 years of experience with interconnects, primarily in engineering and product management roles. His areas of expertise include interconnect solutions for embedding computing, rugged high-speed board-level, and RF connectors. Mike is also associated with the VITA organization (www.vita.org), which drives technology and standards for the bus and board industry. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Rochester and an MBA from Penn State.

Harris • https://www.harris.com/ TE Connectivity • https://www.te.com/usa-en/home.html

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

June 2020 37

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

Saving power and system cost with commercial parts qualified for space applications

By Ken O’Neill

Organizations purchasing satellites are on a perpetual quest to extract ever-increasing value from space assets: We see operators of imaging satellites seeking higher image resolution, faster frame rates, finer channel resolution, and more channels to enable advanced multispectral and hyperspectral imaging.

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Enabling COTS in Space Electronics Systems

The use of radiation-tolerant microcircuits enables a high level of assurance and radiation heritage for space missions, including imaging satellites. Image courtesy Microchip Technology.

As designers create imaging payloads with sufficient resolution to meet the needs of satellite operators, they encounter the perennial problem of constrained downlink bandwidth. It is impractical for low earth orbit (LEO) imaging satellites generating tens of gigabits per second of data and orbiting the earth roughly 16 times a day to send a constant stream of data to the ground through a space relay network.

Historically, imagery data was compressed and stored on board the satellite; however, more efficient use of the data relay network providing connection to the ground station can be accomplished by performing a greater amount of data processing on board the satellites so that information can be transmitted to the ground, instead of raw data. This change has driven an explosion in requirements for components capable of achieving the high rates of data processing needed while at the same time meeting stringent requirements for radiation tolerance.

Developments in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) have created some interesting opportunities to optimize the use of downlink bandwidth, for example by eliminating images that contain nothing of interest (for example, in a satellite that monitors land use, images in which the ground is obscured by thick cloud would be of no value; or in a satellite that tracks maritime traffic, images of the ocean in which no ships are visible). Further, the use of AI/ML allows for automated decision-making on board the satellite, thereby reducing or eliminating human analysis that can add days or weeks of latency to the deployment of imaging data.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

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Orbit

Typical Mission Duration

Example Program

Single Event Effect

TID Effects

Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Low Inclination

2 to 5 years

International Space Station, Earth Science, Astronomy

Mild

Mild

LEO, Polar Inclination

2 to 5 years

Earth Observation, Meteorology

Moderate

Moderate

Mid Earth Orbit (MEO)

10 to 15 years

Satellite Navigation

Severe

Severe

Highly Elliptical Orbit (HEO)

10 to 15 years

High-Latitude Communications

Severe

Severe

Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO)

10 to 20 years

Communications

Severe

Severe

Table 1 | Electrical tests performed under heavy ion irradiation.

Radiation effects in space are broken into two main categories: total ionizing dose (TID) effects and single-event effects (SEE).

TID refers to the long-term accumulation of radiation. In most microelectronic devices, TID causes performance to degrade and leakage current to increase. TID may even cause a complete loss of functionality. TID effects can vary with small variances in waferfabrication process, so microcircuits intended for space applications are often offered with TID testing on a per-wafer-lot basis. The successful deployment of any microcircuit in space depends on a complete understanding of TID effects for the devices being flown.

SEE refers to the outcome of the interaction of a microcircuit with a single subatomic particle. In space applications this is typically a proton or heavy ion, while in aviation applications is typically a neutron. SEE can be divided into several subcategories: single-event latch-ups, single-event upsets, single-event transients, and single-event functional interrupts.

As mission requirements evolve, there is a clear and persistent need for the latest technology in space assets; however, any product deployed in space needs to meet certain basic requirements for sustainable and reliable operation. The need to provide faster revisit rates for Earthobservation imaging drives requirements to field constellations of satellites, which in turn drives the requirement to lower satellite-acquisition costs.

To prepare a commercial component for use in space applications, three key steps are needed: radiation assessment, packaging, and qualification.

Radiation assessment Radiation effects in space are pervasive and depend on the orbit. The deleterious effects of radiation effects on any component destined for space must be assessed, as radiation can cause physical damage to the part and consequent loss of operation of critical equipment of the satellite. Table 1 summarizes radiation effects in a variety of Earth orbits. www.mil-embedded.com

Single-event latch-up is a phenomenon where a parasitic PNPN [anode/cathode] structure becomes forward biased due to the ionization caused by a heavy ion, conducting levels of current which can cause irreversible damage to the integrated circuit.

Single-event upsets occur in flip-flops and embedded memory elements due to the current pulse that results from the ionization and subsequent recombination of atoms of silicon when a heavy ion passes through a microcircuit. Several forms of mitigation are available to designers, such as triple modular redundancy (TMR) for flip-flops and error detection and correction (EDAC) encoding and decoding for memories.

While single-bit upsets in flip-flops or embedded memory cells may have limited consequences, they can be catastrophic if they occur in the configuration memory of a static random-access memory (SRAM)-based field-programmable gate array (FPGA).

In this case, a single heavy ion can cause unintended changes of functionality of the FPGA (Figure 1, next page). Extensive system overhead in the form of configuration scrubbing and repair is needed to mitigate configuration upsets.

Transient changes in signals caused by single-event radiation effects in combinatorial logic are referred to as single-event transients and can be problematic if the transient is present at the data input to a register at exactly the moment the register is clocked. In this case, the transient is preserved as a single-bit upset. As clock frequency increases, the probability of capturing a transient also increases.

Any single radiation event that causes a change in function of an integrated circuit is referred to as a single-event functional interrupt. As integrated circuits (ICs) become more sophisticated, the number of modes in which single-event functional interrupts can occur increases dramatically.

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INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

Enabling COTS in Space Electronics Systems

The successful deployment of any microcircuit in space depends on a complete understanding of radiation effects for the devices being flown. Therefore, it is important for organizations developing space-flight hardware to have test data for the exact wafer lot of the sourced flight parts. However, assessments of radiation effects require destructive tests; flight units cannot be tested for radiation effects as that would severely affect the expected lifetime of the parts. Testing for TID effects is done on a sample basis for each wafer lot. Testing for SEE is performed early in the product’s life, as SEEs are dependent on the integrated circuit design and tend not to be so variable with the wafer-fabrication process.

Extra caution must be taken with commercial parts as any shipment of commercial parts may be sourced from different wafer lots – maybe even different die revisions or even different foundries – which can dramatically increase the variability of radiation effects in the parts. Without strict traceability, it is impossible to be sure that the parts subjected to radiation testing are representative of the parts being flown. In contrast, microcircuits offered for space flight usually have complete lot traceability and the manufacturer of the devices can provide TID test data for the specific wafer lot sourcing the flight parts.

Figure 1 | The effect of heavy ions on the functionality of FPGAs.

Packaging Hermetically sealed ceramic packages are used for most microcircuits used in highreliability satellites. There are three main reasons for the use of ceramic packages. The first relates to the inspectability of ceramic packages: Military standards governing the manufacturing and testing of components for use in space systems (for example MIL-PRF 38534, MIL-PRF 38535, and MIL-STD 883 class B) call for third-party inspection of the integrated circuit in the package prior to sealing the package so that the quality of the assembly may be verified. Inspection is readily performed in ceramic packages prior to lid seal.

Another advantage of ceramic packages is that in extreme temperatures or in a vacuum, the ceramic material does not emit vapors, a phenomenon known as outgassing. In contrast, plastic packages can emit vapors, which can cause fogging on optical components in space. The final advantage of hermetically sealed ceramic packages is that they can protect the microelectronic component inside against ingress of harmful moisture or board-cleaning fluids during assembly and integration of spaceflight hardware.

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MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

For these reasons, hermetically sealed ceramic packages are required for the most stringent and highest-level missions, such as national-security space missions and human spaceflight missions.

Ceramic packages face some increasing and significant challenges as performance requirements increase. More I/O pins required by modern ICs requires that pins for signals, power supplies, and ground are mounted in a 2D array on the underside of the package, as opposed to a linear arrangement of pins around the outside of the package, as implemented in some traditional packages such as ceramic quad flat packs (CQFP). The mismatch of thermal expansion coefficient between package and board causes mechanical stress that can cause normal solder balls to shear as the printed circuit board (PCB) cycles through the extended temperature range. To solve this problem, solder columns are used instead of solder balls; solder columns are mechanically flexible and absorb the mechanical stress associated with the differing rates of thermal expansion of the board and ceramic package.

An additional challenge with ceramic packages is associated with their electrical properties. The latest on-board signal processing systems are being designed with serial data interconnectivity between ICs and between circuit boards, with data rates reaching into the 10 to 12 Gb/sec range. Ceramic packages can keep pace with these needs. However, the next generation of systems will exceed these data rates, which will challenge today’s ceramic package technology. Ceramic package suppliers are responding to the challenge with new technologies which are currently in evaluation.

Because of the challenges in using ceramic packages, some space programs are planning to use integrated circuits with plastic packages. Plastic packages have the advantage of lower electrical parasitics than ceramic packages, which enables higher performance in high speed I/Os. Additionally, the coefficient of thermal expansion of plastic packages is much closer to that of the PCB material, which dramatically reduces the www.mil-embedded.com

high-temperature operating life test for the qualification sample, as opposed to 1,000 hours in the case of class Q. Examples of integrated circuits in ceramic packages are Microchip’s RTG4 radiationtolerant QML class Q and class V-qualified FPGAs (Figure 2).

Figure 2 | Microchip RTG4 radiation-tolerant FPGA.

mechanical stress on solder balls, eliminating the need for solder columns which promotes higher performance.

Regardless of whether plastic or ceramic packages are used, a well-defined set of qualification and screening requirements needs to be in place to assure the success of future space missions.

Qualification The testing performed during qualification of an IC for space use depends on whether the IC is integrated into a ceramic or plastic package.

In the case of ceramic-packaged ICs, qualification is performed to an established standard such as MIL-PRF 38535 or equivalent ESA [European Space Agency] specification. Most U.S.-based suppliers will qualify to MIL-PRF 38535.

Major steps of the qualification are listed in table 1. There are two levels of qualification specified in MIL-PRF 38535, known as QML [Qualified Manufacturer List] class Q and QML class V. QML class Q is intended for high-reliability defense applications, while QML class V is intended for the highest-reliability space applications. The primary differences between QML class Q and class V is that class V has the most stringent qualification requirements, such as a 4,000-hour www.mil-embedded.com

For integrated circuits in plastic packages, there is no agreement across the space industry on a qualification standard. Where plastic packages are offered for space applications, the qualification activities are based upon JEDEC Solid State Technology Association standards. Major suppliers and consumers of ICs in the space industry are collaborating on the definition of a QML standard for the qualification and screening of plastic-packaged ICs for space use, within the framework of a JEDEC committee. When a QML standard for space-grade qualification and screening of plastic encapsulated microcircuits has been agreed upon, it is likely that many IC suppliers currently supporting space-grade products will offer microcircuits qualified and screened to that standard.

New alternatives Providers of satellite services are seeking to open new markets or create new capabilities – such as global communication networks and high-revisit-rate surface imaging – for which constellations of satellites are required. In order to keep the cost of deploying large quantities of satellites at a manageable level, the satellite designers often turn to components that are not designed specifically for radiation environments or space deployment. The risk in doing so is that commercial off-the shelf (COTS) components most often do not come with space heritage, space qualification, or even traceability or homogeneity of wafer lots, which means that radiation data gathered on one sample is not necessarily representative of the parts destined for space flight.

In response to this dilemma, some microcircuit manufacturers are offering radiationtolerant components without the full set of QML space-level screening, for example in a plastic ball-grid-array package that is qualified under JEDEC standards. The development of a “Sub-QML” product such as this can offer an alternative approach that eliminates QML screening to save money. The use of radiation-tolerant microcircuits enables a high level of assurance and radiation heritage for space missions and avoids the lack of traceability seen with COTS components.

The evolving needs of space designers push the requirements for high-density, highperformance integrated circuits. The harsh nature of the space environment demands that a high level of radiation tolerance and high level of reliability assurance is available in components intended for space applications. Regardless of whether plastic or ceramic packages are used, a well-defined set of qualification and screening requirements needs to be in place to assure the success of future space missions. Established manufacturers of space-grade microcircuits are offering an expanded range of products including traditional QML-qualified components plus a category of Sub-QML devices that include the benefits of radiation tolerance and traceability, combined with lower-cost packaging and screening. MES Ken O’Neill is associate director, Space and Aviation Marketing, FPGA Business Unit, Microchip Technology. He has supported FPGA applications in space, aviation, and other high-reliability markets for 25 years. Before joining Microchip and Microsemi, O’Neill served as a design engineer with Hewlett-Packard’s Computer Peripherals Group. Prior to that, he was a design engineer with Racal-Comsec Ltd. O’Neill holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from the University of Reading, England. Readers may reach the author at ken.oneill@microchip.com.

Microchip Technology • www.microchip.com

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

June 2020 41

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

Contested space, small sats, and the gamble on COTS in space

By John McHale, Editorial Director

Contested space, where nations compete for military dominance outside Earth’s atmosphere, is driving many military space platforms, but commercial space and small satellites continue to change the way the military suppliers of space electronics approach radiation-hardened component design from testing to deployment.

Small sats are perhaps the hottest area in space systems today, or at least the most talked-about (maybe along with SpaceX’s launch). Low Earth orbit (LEO) applications are the main playground for small sat designers as they look to launch commercial communications payloads in volume, worrying more about

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Enabling COTS in Space Electronics Systems

Illustration of Lunar Flashlight small satellite. Courtesy NASA.

meeting cost and size restrictions rather than the radiation-hardening requirements necessary for higher orbits and military satellites.

The military is also looking for ways to leverage the cost benefits of small sats to deploy technology more quickly as traditional space missions continue; in fact, the need is even more pressing now for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), as U.S. adversaries such as China and Russia look to expand their military presence in space.

“Evolving threats such as ballistic missiles and hypersonics and how to counter them are driving a lot of the strategic planning for systems in the military space arena today,” says Tony Jordan, director of business development at Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions (Colorado Springs, Colorado). “There is a lot of opportunity out there and not just in military applications but in also areas such as the Lunar Gateway and civil space modernization.”

“Contested space is driving this demand for high reliability and product pedigree,” says Josh Broline, director of marketing and applications, Industrial and Communications Business Division at Renesas (Melbourne, Florida). “There have been expectations that the DoD would embrace small sats and commercial technology for space, but we still see more requirements for high-reliability components. U.S. adversaries have raised their game and the DoD wants to maintain its advantage in space, which means more stringent requirements than if there was a push toward commercial small sat technology.

“It is somewhat ironic that as the commercialization of space starts to heat up some are going the other way,” he adds.

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Small sat impact Both traditional, mission-critical, military space missions and commercial small sat applications are growing in number. But the differences in mission profiles, mission life, and radiation requirements can be stark.

“The small sat market is still heavily driven by commercial constellations and in mostly LEO applications,” Jordan says.

“Small sat constellations on the military side will have different mission profiles and will be on the smaller side in terms of volume of satellites in the constellation.”

“Most of the demand for these components and COTS [commercial off-the-shelf] in space is on the mega constellations, where you have hundreds to thousands of small sats in individual constellations,” Broline adds.

NASA is also leveraging small sats, or cube sats as NASA officials often term them, for multiple missions including lunar exploration. “A number of things have coalesced to create what is termed the ‘small sat’ and ‘CubeSat’ revolution,” says Christopher Baker, Small Spacecraft Technology program executive within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. “Part of it has been the availability of commercial off-the-shelf components that have incredible processing power, are very small and function on low electrical power.”

They allow you to do things that previously would not have been possible with a large, monolithic spacecraft, he adds.

One planned mission is Lunar Flashlight, a very small six-unit satellite (12 by 24 by 36 centimeters) developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, California), and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (Huntsville, Alabama). The CubeSat uses an optical receiver aligned with four lasers that sequentially pulse the lunar landscape to look for water ice and other volatiles associated with lunar cold traps. “[Military platforms] also follow a spiral development plan,” Jordan explains.

“For example, having 20 satellites in the first launch, then, as new technology is www.mil-embedded.com

Figure 1 | Pictured is the LeanREL plastic microcontroller from Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions that it is targeted at constellation and new space applications. Photo courtesy of Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions.

developed, the launch of the next batch, which also may contain even more satellites.

That spiral development of platforms with two- to four-year mission life enables the military to insert more tech, respond to emerging threats, and fix any odd problems they have.”

“We have definitely seen a change the last couple years in terms of small sat proliferation,” says Timothee Dargnies, CEO for 3D-PLUS (Buc, France). “At first, those putting up small sats were so focused on volume and keeping costs down that reliability suffered and many of the small sats started to fail. While commercial components may be simple to procure, they are not that simple to upscreen; proper upscreening can be expensive and way more complicated than initially anticipated.”

Gap between commercial and rad-hard Traditional space suppliers needed to innovate to meet cost restraints while still maintaining necessary radiation resistance. “Systems need a lot of computing capability in a small size with good power efficiency, but a lot of times can’t make that happen with traditional rad-hard technology because of the gap between true rad-hard and commercial component reliability,” Jordan says. “Our LeanRel product enables us to wrap packaging around a high-performance FPGA [field-programmable gate array], for example. These high-performance components are necessary to accomplish critical tasks like tracking hypersonic missiles, or calculating how to intercept a threat in terminal phase. And you can’t do that with all rad-hard products, you need that commercial computing density.”

“Under the LeanRel line we developed a plastic microcontroller that is 14 mm by 14 mm,” he continues. “When you look at plastic versus traditional ceramic hermetic package, the area is the same, but with the volume thickness and weight there is a significant savings as well as a lower price.” (Figure 1.)

“The key is to not let that downward pressure from the small sat providers on the price impact reliability in a big way,” says Anton Quiroz, CEO of Apogee Semiconductor (Plano, Texas). “That’s what we drive to do with our processes and flows – still make a reliable product but at a reduced price. Apogee Semiconductor’s TALRAD solution enables this as it changes the layout of the component to reduce the leakage induced by radiation while helping the foundry to improve its process.”

“While military space programs historically required rad-hard-by-design process components for their applications, they are now taking a smarter approach when it comes to defining radiation resistance requirements to allow themselves the use of better performing components,” Dargnies says.

The gamble: COTS in space COTS continues to be a four-letter word to many in the space electronics community, as the first letter of the acronym represents commercial, which in the rad-hard world means “risk.”

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INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

Enabling COTS in Space Electronics Systems

“Actually, COTS in space has been around for many years, back to the early NASA missions,” says Paul Cook, director of Missile Systems, Business Strategy at CurtissWright Defense Solutions (Ashburn, Virginia). “[Its] popularity increased due to the commercial market expansion. Small sat and low-cost solutions drive using COTS with rad-tolerance over rad-hard electronics. An example is using a monitoring system to react to a single-event upset and to promptly recover from it to operate through has reduced overall program cost and schedule when comparing it to a full rad-hard solution.” Curtiss-Wright offers the TTC MWDAU-20XX 20 Mb/sec Miniature Wide-band Data Acquisition Unit for space applications.

Test Solutions (Colorado Springs, Colorado). “One could buy three memory devices from the same lot and from the same company, but find they perform differently when it comes to radiation. You could even find the same date lot code on the packaging of one batch, but discover they are actually from different wafer runs.

“We are also seeing military space guys trying COTS,” Dargnies says. “But you have to be careful when it comes to ensuring the reliability and the usability in space of COTS parts. Our space-qualified modules are mostly based on COTS, but with radiation and reliability guarantees.” 3D PLUS offers the 64Mx72 DDR2 module, which is SEL immune, SEE [single-event effect]-characterized and 100 Krad(Si).

“COTS components can represent a gamble,” Thomson continues. “Components in a spacecraft must be consistent and predictable in their radiation performance. For this reason, an area where it would be very risky to use COTS is in the power distribution system. If you lose power to the spacecraft, you likely lose the spacecraft for good.”

“The use of COTS components is seen as a very risky by some as the impact of radiation on COTS components is unknown, says Malcolm Thomson, president, Radiation

XILINX LAUNCHES 20 NM SPACE-GRADE FPGA WITH MACHINE LEARNING FEATURES Officials at Xilinx announced the first 20-nanometer (nm) space-grade FPGA with ultrahigh throughput and bandwidth performance for satellite and space applications. The new 20 nm radiation-tolerant (RT) Kintex UltraScale XQRKU060 FPGA provides onorbit reconfiguration, more than a 10-time increase in digital signal processing (DSP) performance.

Key attributes to the new FPGA include machine learning (ML) tools and unlimited on-orbit reconfiguration. The ML capability will enable analysis of images generated by signal processing payloads such as image classification – a cloud, for example – and object detection – for instance, something like a ship, says Minal Sawant, space systems architect, Aerospace and Defense Vertical Marketing, at Xilinx. Much like with image classification with airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) applications, having the ML perform the classification at the sensor level enables faster decision times, she adds.

The ML features are enabled via a portfolio of ML development tools supporting industry standard frameworks, including TensorFlow and PyTorch. These tools help the device enable neural network inference acceleration for real-time onboard processing in space with a process and analyze solution. The XQRKU060 provides 5.7 tera operations per second (TOPs) of INT8 performance optimized for deep learning, according to Xilinx.

The XQRKU060’s on-orbit reconfiguration capabilities will essentially enable satellites to update in real time, deliver video-on-demand, and compute “on-the-fly” to process complex algorithms. For example, with a telecommunications satellite, the on-orbit reconfigurability will enable “operators to change and adapt frequency plans, channelization bandwidths, and routing uplinks to specific downlinks,” Sawant says. These updates can be made prior to launch and after the satellite is in orbit.

The XQRKU060 has as much as 1.6 TeraMACs of signal-processing compute power, more than a 10-time increase compared to the prior generation. Its 32 high-speed transceivers (SerDes) can run up to 12.5 Gb/sec to deliver 400 Gb/sec aggregate bandwidth. The XQRKU060 also has 40 mm by 40 mm ceramic packaging capable of withstanding vibrations and handling during launch as well as radiation effects in harsh orbit environments with single-event effects (SEE) mitigation, meeting industry requirements for all orbits and deep-space missions. Radiation tolerance across all orbits is a total ionizing dose (TID0 greater than 100 Krad/si, SEL >80MeV-cm2/mg.

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Renesas’ Broline agrees: “You don’t want to cut corners to save a few bucks on power management,” he says. “For example, some of our power-management devices directly power mission-critical FPGAs and microprocessors. You do not want to cut corners on your power supply, because you may end up damaging your expensive and mission-critical FPGA and microprocessor due to radiation induced events on the power supply.”

For small sats and launch vehicle applications Renesas offers the ISL71043M/ ISL71040M a plastic-packaged, radiation-tolerant PWM controller and GaN FET driver for DC/DC power supplies.

(Figure 2.)

“The mega-constellation manufacturers have driven COTS use, but even they recognize the need to have components qualified to known levels of radiation performance or the satellites can fail and potentially billions lost,” Thomson says. “While the large constellations are made up of what are, in effect, disposable satellites, there are still limits to how disposable. For example, a commercial component with a 5 krad total dose resistance, may work in a certain orbit for, say, one to three years of mission life. However, higher orbits and traditional space applications have a much longer mission life than five years and that component would not be suitable at all.” www.mil-embedded.com

The platforms that would use unqualified COTS components also factor in this risk of failure and carry low financial risk.

“One year I attended a small sat conference where some panelists were scoffing at a certain constellation provider who said he planned on replacing all his satellites every five years or so, for about $50 billion,” he continues. “But when you do the analysis you realize it made sense, as this provider was planning on delivering internet service to hundreds of millions of people; now $50 billion didn’t seem so large anymore.”

“It comes down to risk management,” Broline says. “If they want to cut corners for cost reasons and leverage COTS parts, they have to upscreen those parts, which means taking on more risk versus using the traditional parts.”

Part of that risk management is maintaining reliability with proper testing and traceability. “For end users they first have to know what is under the hood, particularly what process the IC is built on,” Broline says. “Then they need to know how the reliability testing was done, what kind of field returns, history there may be, etc. Not knowing the component background info can keep system suppliers up at night. Determining what areas to focus more on from a radiation or mechanical perspective is an ongoing effort.”

Testing methods Testing is everything in the radiation world. Test before you integrate and test before you launch. And the testing methods mostly remain the same. It’s the requirements that are changing.

“The methods, and the physics of course, haven’t really changed in 50 years since we started,” Thomson says. “However, we are seeing quite a bit of work being done on laser-based SEE testing. This is where testers use laser light in short pulses to activate the silicon, similar to that with traditional heavy-ion beams.

You can use this technique to screen a part. If it fails under the laser then it is not likely worth performing a heavy-ion test on it. If a part doesn’t fail the laser, then it is a good candidate test using traditional methods. www.mil-embedded.com

Figure 2 | Pictured is the the ISL71043M/ISL71040M, a plastic-packaged, radiation-tolerant PWM controller and GaN FET driver for DC/DC power supplies. Photo courtesy of Renesas.

“We are looking at implementing a laser-based system this year and our small sat business will benefit from it,” he continues. “A small sat manufacturer could leverage the laser scan for, say, three similar components. If one shows upsets you would screen it out, then pick one of the other two and then fully test them. This can save cost and time in the testing process by weeding out less tolerant components.

“The traditional space companies are sticking with rad-hard-by-design and a laser test may not be so useful to them,” Thomson says. “Manufacturers of rad-hard components, however, are interested in laser testing to identify any problems in the early design stages. They can determine the sensitive areas of the silicon design, identify the physical area and device feature causing the upset, and then change the design.

Laser-based testing systems have very high-powered lasers; handling that much power through the optics is challenging. This is why these systems have been traditionally used at universities or in research labs. Now, laser testing is becoming a more viable option for commercial environments.” MES

JAN BUSINESS STEADY FOR MILITARY SATELLITE INDUSTRY Military JAN semiconductor products are still a critical part of the supply chain for military aircraft, navy ships, and satellites. “They are high-end parts, so they may not be ideal for a small satellite with cost constraints and lower radiation requirements,” says Joe Benedetto, president of VPT Components (Blacksburg, Virginia). “These parts are very data-sheet-driven. For example, a DLA [Defense Logistics Agency]-qualified part as a JAN part must meet the actual slash sheet and meet every parameter on it. It can’t even be off on one parameter.”

“JAN parts are definitely off-the-shelf, but not a commercial part,” Benedetto continues.

“They are a specialized part. When you specify a COTS diode at Digi-Key, that’s a good commercial part, but is literally a piece of silicon encapsulated in plastic. After a year or two in a harsh environment it will likely not survive. Most of our JAN diodes are hermetic glass-encapsulated, using metallurgical bonds, not pressure points, and are meant to last 15 years or more. Eighty percent of our radiation-resistant parts meet 100 krad(Si) total ionizing dose,” Benedetto affirms.

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www.mil-embedded.com

CONNECTING WITH MIL EMBEDDED

By Editorial Staff

GIVING BACK | PODCAST | WHITE PAPER | BLOG | VIDEO | SOCIAL MEDIA | WEBCAST

GIVING BACK

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America 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 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), a nonprofit organization founded in 2004 by Iraq War veteran Paul Rieckhoff to facilitate bringing resources to and community among post-9/11 veterans across the U.S. Its programs include data-driven research on post-9/11 veteran issues, veterans’ transition assistance through its Rapid Response Referral Program (RRRP), and community building through its VetTogether local in-person and online community events. The organization connects, unites, and empowers more than 400,000 veterans and allies nationwide. According to its leadership, IAVA organizes locally and drives historic impacts nationally.

A major focus of the IAVA’s mission, according to organization materials, consists of nonpartisan advocacy on Capitol Hill. IAVA has been involved in, and at times led, the passage of a number of pieces of legislation relevant to veterans and families. The organization also publishes an annual policy agenda that focuses on recommendations for Congress, the executive branch, the private sector, state nonprofit orgs, and other stakeholders.

Another of the IAVA’s primary programs is the RRRP, which pledges support to service members, veterans, and their families; a team of IAVA transition managers endeavors to connect those in need of resources relating to healthcare, financial aid, housing, legal help, employment, and education.

For additional information on IAVA, please visit https://iava.org/.

PODCAST

WHITE PAPER

Defense industry response to COVID-19 pandemic Sponsored by Aerospace Tech Week, which will take place on March 24-26 2021 in Toulouse, France, after being postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Defense companies – whether prime contractors, system integrators, or third-party commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) suppliers – are deemed essential businesses and allowed to operate during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even so, their employees and bottom lines are feeling the impact of this global crisis.

In this podcast, MES editorial director John McHale talks with Mark Aslett, CEO of Mercury Systems, about how the nationwide shutdown affects the defense supply chain and the speed of the defense acquisition process. Aslett also shares positive examples of how defense companies are stepping up to help the victims of the virus; he details how his own team at Mercury is responding and what company leadership is doing to help their own employees during this unprecedented time.

Listen to the podcast: https://bit.ly/2S47vaS

46 June 2020

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Advancements in High Reliability Interconnection Systems: Miniaturization of Connectors for the New High Speed Digital Electronics

By Robert Stanton, Omnetics Connector Semiconductor device-driven circuitry is being used in electrical-power, high-speed signal transmission, and datacollection systems in significantly different ways than in the past. Interconnect systems must host and deliver new combinations of circuit and signal formats and power while maintaining the highest signal integrity of data being processed from one module to the next.

In this white paper, readers will review the improvements and changes needed to serve the very rapid demand for modernized interconnection and wiring systems that are used now and will be implemented in new electronic applications in defense, satellite constellations, and portable electronic systems.

Read the white paper: https://bit.ly/2Vycnaw Read more white papers: http://mil-embedded.com/ white-papers/ www.mil-embedded.com

THE LATEST, MOST INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGY

THE RESOURCE GUIDE PROVIDES INSIGHT ON EMBEDDED TOOLS AND STRATEGIES FOR MILITARY-SPECIFIC TECHNICAL SUBJECTS The September 2020 Military Embedded Systems Resource Guide will focus on embedded hardware and software used in military applications: Our Special Report will examine the role of increasingly sophisticated shipboard electronics, while additional features will report on the latest test and measurement trends. We’ll aim the Industry Spotlight on the always-relevant issue of obsolescence and counterfeit parts in the supply chain.

The September 2020 Resource Guide will also highlight such key electronics-buying categories as avionics, communications, cybersecurity, electronic warfare, embedded hardware and software, obsolescence/EOL, radar, RTOS and tools, RF and microwave, and safety certification. Don’t miss this special jam-packed issue – mil-embedded.com it’s our biggest of the year.

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The RTX SFF series is the latest in our COTS Talon recording systems that deliver the industry’s highest levels of performance in the harshest, space-constrained environments. You’ll get high dynamic range, exceptional recording speeds and ample storage capacity for extended missions—all in this compact solution.

• Sealed, rugged, ½ ATR chassis for MIL-STD 810 and 461 • Multi-channel recording, A/Ds from 200 MS/s to 6.4 GS/s

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• Easily removable 61 TB SSD QuickPac drive pack • Ideal for UAVs, military vehicles, aircraft pods and more • Operating temperature from -40°C to +60°C • sFPDP and Ethernet models available

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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, Talon and QuickPac are trademarks of Pentek, Inc. Other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.