Military Embedded Systems October 2019

@military_cots

John McHale

Mil Tech Trends

Virtualization and legacy systems

Mil Tech Insider

Classified data-at-rest rates

Industry Spotlight Using GaN in AESA radar MIL-EMBEDDED.COM

7

Covering open standards

20 10 30

October 2019 | Volume 15 | Number 7

FACE & SOSA

Update P 34

P 18 Next-generation military communications challenges

By Wyatt Taylor, Analog Devices, Inc.

ISR signal processing at the edge P 14

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Volume 15 Number 7

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October 2019

SPECIAL REPORT

Signal Processing for ISR Sensor Applications 14 ISR signal processing at the edge

COLUMNS Editor’s Perspective 7 Covering open standards

By John McHale

By Emma Helfrich, Associate Editor

18

Next-generation military communications challenges

By Wyatt Taylor, Analog Devices, Inc.

14

MIL TECH TRENDS

Virtualization for Embedded Computing 20 Virtualization improves efficiency of legacy military embedded systems

By Sally Cole, Senior Editor

24

Optimized virtualization for embedded computing

University Update 8 Cyber agility framework project trains analysts to outmaneuver attacks

By Sally Cole

Mil Tech Insider 10 PCIe Gen3 and NVMe drive classified data-at-rest data-storage rates

By Mark Grovak

By Richard Jaenicke, Green Hills Software

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT 18

Leveraging Gallium Nitride (GaN) Technology for Military Radar 30 The benefits and challenges of using GaN technology in AESA radar systems

By Mario LaMarche, Mercury Systems

FACE & SOSA UPDATE 34

Government and industry partnership driving FACE & SOSA success

DEPARTMENTS 12

Defense Tech Wire

44

Editor’s Choice Products

46

Connecting with Mil Embedded

By Emma Helfrich

By Mil-Embedded.com Editorial Staff

By John McHale, Editorial Director

38

35

FACE Consortium Member List

36

FACE conformance becoming a necessity

By John McHale, Editorial Director

38

FACE approach improves affordability, time-to-field of avionics systems and software platforms

By Ricardo Camacho, LDRA

40

SOSA initiative gaining momentum in defense electronics community

By John McHale, Editorial Director

30 https://www.linkedin.com/ groups/1864255/

43

SOSA Consortium Member List

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@military_cots

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ON THE COVER: Top image: A formation of F-35 Lightning IIs from the 388th Fighter Wing and 419th FW stationed at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, perform aerial maneuvers during as part of a combat power exercise over Utah Test and Training Range. As the first combat-ready F-35 unit in the Air Force, the 388th and 419th FWs are ready to deploy anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Cory D. Payne.

Bottom image: Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms such as the MV-22 Osprey pictured here will require state-of-the-art signal processing for its sensor systems. Photo by Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Mackenzie Binion.

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MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

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EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE

Covering open standards

By John McHale, Editorial Director This headline pretty much sums of much of what we cover and have covered since our first issue. We’ve focused on how open standards have driven open architectures in military systems, whether they are using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products or not.

The defense budget cuts of a few years ago also drove the DoD to embrace more commonality in an effort to reduce long-term life cycle costs on systems’ front and back end. To accomplish this, open standards had to be embraced in open architecture designs that enabled shorter and less-costly technology refresh cycles.

That brings us to the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) and Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) consortia, both run by the Open Group for the Air Force, Army, and Navy. Membership in each consortium consists of the services, prime contractors, and system integrators as well as embedded-system suppliers. All are working together to enable more commonality and reduce the cost of future military systems and drive heightened capability to the warfighter.

The FACE Consortium has most recently released the FACE Technical Standard 3.0, while the SOSA Consortium is working toward the release of its first standard.

Much of the progress from both was showcased at the U.S. Air Force-hosted FACE & SOSA Expo and Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) event, held in Dayton, Ohio this September.

We provide extensive coverage on the event starting on page 34 of this issue, with roundtables on FACE and SOSA, respectively, as well as membership lists and coverage of the event itself and its key presentations.

This issue’s coverage continues the work we’ve been doing to provide the latest www.mil-embedded.com

developments on SOSA and FACE, which includes the recent 3-part article, “Development of the next-generation OpenVPX-based embedded system standard – A tri-service convergence of approaches,” by Mike Hackert, program sponsor at NAVAIR [Naval Air Systems Command], Ben Peddicord, chief of Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) C5ISR Center, and Dr. Ilya Lipkin, lead manager for SOSA at the AFLCMC [Air Force Life Cycle Management Center].

Going forward, we will be doing more of the same, working with The Open Group and the outreach organizations for each consortium to deliver updates throughout 2020 and beyond.

This is not a new area for OpenSystems Media, as our company was founded on providing information on open standards to help design engineers in the military, aerospace, industrial, automotive, IoT, and other markets do their jobs. The first OSM publication was VMEBus Magazine, launched more than three decades ago, and still published today as VITA Technologies magazine that we produce with VITA. We have undertaken similar efforts with the PICMG and PC/104 organizations, with PICMG Systems and Technology and PC/104 and Small Form Factors publications, respectively.

Were we ahead of the game in covering these topics? Hard to say, but we’ve been there since the beginning and will continue to be there, as our FACE and SOSA coverage this issue demonstrates.

Open standards and open architectures are the present and future of military electronics development. Without them, new platforms will be too expensive to procure and capability will make its way to the warfighter much too slowly to be useful at all against an ever-moresophisticated adversary.

“Standards create markets,” Chip Downing, Senior Market Development Director, Aerospace & Defense at RTI and Chair, FACE Consortium Outreach Subcommittee, told me during the TIM event. “The use of open standards with a competitive supply chain can reduce cost and risk and accelerate products and solutions to markets.” For more from Downing, see our FACE roundtable on page 36 and read his thoughts in our Mil Tech Trends section in an article titled “Virtualization improves efficiency of legacy military embedded systems,” written by Senior Editor Sally Cole, on page 20.

“Standards create markets.

The use of open standards with a competitive supply chain can reduce cost and risk and accelerate products and solutions to markets.”

– Chip Downing, Senior Market Development Director, Aerospace & Defense at RTI and Chair, FACE Consortium Outreach Subcommittee Find our SOSA roundtable on page 40; one of our participants, Mark Grovak, Director, Avionics Business Development, at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions, covers the consortias’ work in his Mil Tech Insider column on page 10.

SOSA members also discuss trends in signal processing for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance applications in our Special Report, “ISR signal processing at the edge,” by Associate Editor Emma Helfrich, on page 14.

In our upcoming November/December issue, we also dedicate our Industry Spotlight section to the latest in open standards development, with articles from industry contributors.

Hey, like I said … we cover standards.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

October 2019 7

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

Cyber agility framework project trains analysts to outmaneuver attacks

By Sally Cole, Senior Editor University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) researchers, together with scientists at the U.S. Army Research Office, developed a cyber agility framework to gauge the activity of cyberattackers and corresponding network protection over time.

To detect and respond quickly to escalating cyberattacks, UTSA researchers developed this framework to “score” the agility of cyber attackers and defenders.

Say, for example, you have five doors to your house but only one guard dog to defend it: “Where would you put the dog? A burglar watching your house will try to figure out if there’s a door that’s never being watched and then try to walk through it,” says Dr. Purush Iyer, division chief, network sciences at the Army Research Office, which is part of the Army Futures Command’s Army Research Laboratory. “The cyber agility framework is essentially trying to answer the question of where you should focus your resources.”

Most organizations, including the U.S. Army, have limited resources and want to know the most efficient ways to guard their data. “You need to keep moving things around to keep adversaries guessing,” Iyer says. “But if you watch your adversary and get to know more about what they’re doing and any telltale signs from their actions, you can look at how your actions are impacting the adversary’s. What’s stopping him or her from getting in? If they’re getting in, how are they doing it? The cyber agility framework tries to answer these questions by allowing an analyst to look at the adversary’s history to plan future defensive actions.”

As you can imagine, analyzing or deriving meaning from the massive amounts of information analysts are inundated with is difficult. And that’s precisely what this research project is trying to address.

Cyber agility isn’t simply about patching security holes, “it’s about understanding what happens over time,” explains Jose Mireles, who co-developed this framework as part of his UTSA master’s thesis and now works for the U.S. Department of Defense.

“Sometimes when you protect one vulnerability, you expose yourself to 10 others. In car crashes, we understand how to test for safety using the rules of physics. It’s much harder to quantify cybersecurity because scientists have yet to figure out the rules of cybersecurity. Having formal metrics and measurement to understand the attacks that occur will benefit a wide range of cyber professionals.”

To develop the cyber agility framework, Mireles collaborated with fellow UTSA student Eric Ficke and researchers at Virginia Tech, the U.S. Air Force Laboratory, and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory.

The group used a “honeypot,” which is a computer system that lures real cyberattacks, so they could attract and analyze malicious traffic in terms of time and effectiveness.

As both the attackers and the defenders created new techniques, the researchers were able to better understand how a series of engagements transformed into an adaptive, responsive, and agile pattern or what they call an “evolution generation.”

The end goal of this research project is “to make it easier for analysts to understand their own actions and to get better situational awareness of the kinds of attacks – especially ones that morph over a period of time – to be able to understand how they’re evolving,” Iyer says. “If you keep seeing a bunch of packets from a particular IP address and it morphs into an attack, you want to be able to pick up the signs

8 October 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

so that for future attacks you can try to stop them. That’s what this framework tries to do by providing better analytical and visualization tools so that analysts can better understand both their own actions and to plan future actions.”

In the future, “war won’t be conducted only over land, sea, and air; the cyberdomain will be incredibly important,” he continues. “Investments in the Army are geared toward finding answers to foundational problems so that we can build systems and be ready.”

The cyber problem is a ridiculously complex one, Iyer points out. “Everyone always asks: why can’t these problems be solved? The current state of affairs is that cyberanalysts have rudimentary tools and are dealing with humungous amounts of data,” he says. “They’re sifting through all kinds of false flags and information.

Despite all of the work that’s happened, it remains an important problem.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) and other aspects of computer science and game theory may help. “But AI itself can be attacked, so it’s always the sort of game where you defend one thing and an attacker will find some other way to attack you,” Iyer adds. “Defenders need to shore up their defense to the next level, because it’s always a cat-andmouse game.” www.mil-embedded.com

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MIL TECH INSIDER

PCIe Gen3 and NVMe drive classified data-at-rest data-storage rates

By Mark Grovak An industry perspective from Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions

A simple but essential truth about military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) applications is that the sensor bandwidth and compute power needed to support them continuously increases. Today, for example, the Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) consortium is driving industry for data recorders that can support 100 Gb Ethernet with encryption to support the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) ISR roadmap.

Until recently, deployed data-storage systems were based on the Serial ATA (SATA) bus interface, which tops out at 3 Gb/s. At that rate, even users who have a RAID design and multiple encryptors wouldn’t reach their desired bandwidth performance.

The good news is that although SATA has run out of gas for the highest-performance ISR application requirements, the advent of a new generation of data-storage systems based on high-speed non-volatile memory express (NVMe) protocol can deliver a transmission/storage performance improvement of almost 50% over earlier SATAbased solutions, enabling Type 1 NSA encryption and data storage to reach previously unachievable speeds.

Legacy interfaces, such as SCSI, ATA, and SATA, were originally designed for use with spinning media-based hard drives. Today, using SATA with much faster solid-state drive (SSD) memory creates a system bottleneck. NVMe memory, in contrast, was designed to be used with solid-state media and enables data to be stored at the full read/write speeds of flash memory itself. While previous generations of data recorders had SATA interfaces, or converted PCIe to SATA before it could be stored, today’s state-of-the-art data recorders use NVMe memory to reduce latency and boost bandwidth.

Now, thanks to high-speed Type 1 encryption design and the use of NVMe to eliminate storage interface bottlenecks, system designers can achieve higher rate performance throughout the data-storage system, resulting in a powerful alternative to slower SATA-based legacy cryptographic solutions.

The recent U.S. Air Force-hosted FACE [Future Airborne Capability Environment]/ SOSA Exposition and Technical Interchange Meeting – held during September 2019 – saw Curtiss-Wright and L3Harris collaborating to present the first live demonstration of a next-generation classified data-at-rest tactical data-storage system based on high-speed PCIe Gen3 communications and high-performance NVMe storage technology. The demo system automatically monitors the RF spectrum to detect, isolate, and classify ISR communications signals for secure situational awareness of mission environments. The resulting metadata is encrypted and securely stored, allowing for postprocessing and further analysis.

The demo system – which featured L3Harris’ new NSA Type-1 certification-ready PCIe Gen3-based DataCrypt NVMe cryptographic module running on Curtiss-Wright DSP module (Figure 1) – performed at a read/write throughput of 10/17 Gbps (nom/max) per data channel. Each encryption device is designed to support two data channels, which when used together deliver aggregated throughput of 34 Gbps. In addition, multiple aggregated modules can be integrated to deliver 100 Gbps Ethernet rates.

The demo system was housed in Elma’s SOSA-conformant E-Frame Development Platform designed for C4ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards (CMOSS). It also featured an AI-based machine learning software application that provided the signal classification capability described earlier and a CMOSS-compliant and SOSA-aligned 2 MHz-to-6 GHz phase coherent digitized tuner.

10 October 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

›

Figure 1 | A classified data-at-rest tactical data-storage system based on PCIe Gen3 and NVMe storage technology.

In addition to the new Type 1 encryptor module, the demonstration also showed rugged open architecture OpenVPX modules developed to be aligned with the SOSA Technical Standard, including a security-enabled DSP engine, an Intel Coffee Lake-based single-board computer, and an Ethernet switch.

The hard numbers: The data-storage system demo featured up to 34 Gbps total read and write throughput, interoperability with native NVMe drivers (NVMe 1.2) for host and storage devices, concurrent multilevel security processing of classified levels from Unclassified to Top Secret, a NSA Type 1 certificationready crypto engine, a single-width XMC mezzanine card conforming to VITA 42.0 XMC (74 by 149 mm), and standard VITA 42.0 XMC and VITA 42.3 XMC PCI Express Protocol Layer (PCIe Gen3).

The demonstration showed that ISR system designers can begin the process of transitioning to PCIe Gen3/NMVebased architectures to reach previously unreachable encrypted data-storage throughput rates. It also showed that 100 Gb/s performance is no longer “on the horizon” but is achievable right now.

Mark Grovak is Director, Avionics Business Development, at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions.

Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions www.curtisswrightds.com www.mil-embedded.com

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

By Emma Helfrich, Associate Editor NEWS

MQ-25 unmanned aerial refueler completes first test flight with Boeing Boeing and the U.S. Navy completed the first test flight of the MQ-25 unmanned aerial refueler. The MQ-25 test asset completed the autonomous two-hour flight under the direction of Boeing test pilots operating from a ground-control station at MidAmerica St. Louis Airport. The aircraft executed an autonomous taxi and takeoff and then flew a predetermined route to validate the aircraft’s basic flight functions and operations with the ground-control station.

The Boeing-owned MQ-25 test craft – a predecessor to the engineering development model (EDM) aircraft – is being used for early learning and discovery to meet the goals of the Navy’s accelerated acquisition program. It will enable better use of the combat strike fighters currently performing the tanking role and will extend the range of the carrier air wing, according to the company.

Targeting pods to be updated for U.S. Air Force The U.S. Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $141 million indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) task order for new LITENING advanced targeting pods and upgrades that will bring existing pods up to the current configuration. LITENING features high-definition video, 1K FLIR sensors, laser imaging sensors, and multiple plug-and-play data link options.

Any LITENING pod currently in service can be upgraded to the latest configuration, according to the company. A number of squadrons from the U.S. Air Force, Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, and Marine Corps are using the pods at the moment, as are several international customers. It has been integrated on various manned and unmanned platforms, including the AV-8B, A-10, B-52, C-130, F-15, F-16, F/A-18, and MQ-9.

Radar, EW testing solutions from Rohde & Schwarz Rohde & Schwarz is focusing on bringing realistic scenarios in the radar and EW testing arenas. One of the company’s offerings in this arena is the Pulse Sequencer software, which is used in tandem with signal generators to closely simulate angle of arrival (AoA) in the lab to verify the direction-finding performance of radar warning receivers. Such an approach, say company officials, does away with the need for expensive field tests and creates complex simulations with static or moving emitters in a 3D scenario right in the lab.

Figure 1 | The MQ-25 test asset, known as T1, completed the autonomous two-hour flight under the direction of Boeing test pilots operating from a ground-control station. Boeing photo.

The company also offers test engineers its digital radio frequency memory (DRFM) jammers, which are used in the field to deceive hostile radars and protect assets; the company uses high-end signal and spectrum analyzers and phase noise testers, designed to address all challenges during the design phase of such smart jammers, but also for system performance validation and production.

U.S. Air Force satellite services contract awarded to Iridium Iridium Communications Inc. announced that it won a $738.5 million, seven-year, fixed-price contract with the United States Department of Defense (DoD) through the U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSpC) to provide unlimited satellite services from its unique Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation.

Through what is known as the AFSpC’s Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services (EMSS) program, Iridium will continue to deliver access to global secure and unsecure voice, broadcast, netted or Distributed Tactical Communications System (DTCS), and select other services for an unlimited number of DoD and associated DoD-approved subscribers.

12 October 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Figure 2 | Test and measurement equipment manufacturer Rohde & Schwarz showed its radar and electronic warfare (EW) testing solutions at the DSEI 2019 show, held during September 2019. Rohde & Schwarz photo.

www.mil-embedded.com

NEWS

Lockheed Martin opens multidomain space-simulation facility

AI-powered Agile Condor capability will get demo with MQ-9

Lockheed Martin opened a simulation facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that enables the U.S. Air Force and other entities to simulate, test, and train in a multidomain environment that reflects today’s complex space environment. According to the company, warfighters can bring in any tool from any company to simulate, test, and train in a realistic, synthetic space environment without disrupting real missions. Pulsar Guardian is compliant with the Air Force Universal Command and Control Interface (UCI) standard.

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) won a contract from the U.S. Air Force (USAF) to demonstrate the Air Force Research Lab’s Agile Condor capability, using a MQ-9 remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) owned by GA-ASI.

Pulsar Guardian can simulate what an air-space integration looks like, say Lockheed Martin officials, by showing how an unmanned aircraft or fighter jet could interface directly with a satellite and get the right data at the right time to take action.

Cyberattacks and mitigations can be tested in a sandboxed, collaborative environment. Lockheed Martin states that its Pulsar facilities reduce travel time and cost for employees and customers by bringing subject-matter experts and engineers into the conversation to diagnose problems and tweak products using virtual and augmented reality tools.

Agile Condor – a high-performance computing architecture aimed at demonstrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies – will be integrated into the RPA capability over a 10-month period beginning in September 2019.

The flight demonstration phase will be used to experiment with the Agile Condor payload to determine the optimum AI and ML methodologies to find, identify, and track select targets. The Agile Condor capability also has the potential to reduce satellite bandwidth requirements as a result of its ability to identify, classify, and nominate targets of interest, say GA-ASI officials. If operating in a fully autonomous mode, it would be possible to only engage SATCOM connectivity or other data link channels to disseminate the imagery and location of those targets.

Raytheon debuts Peregrine air-to-air missile Raytheon continues to develop a new medium-range, airlaunched weapon called the Peregrine missile that the company asserts is half the size and cost of today’s air-to-air missiles, while delivering greater range and effect. Raytheon officials claim that the missile, developed to strengthen the capabilities of current fighter aircraft, is faster and more maneuverable than legacy medium-range, air-to-air missiles, and doubles the weapons loadout on a variety of fighter platforms.

Figure 3 | Pulsar Guardian is a new facility built by Lockheed Martin that enables the U.S. Air Force and others to simulate, test, and train in a multidomain environment that simulates space. Lockheed Martin photo.

Its miniaturized guidance system is capable of detecting and tracking targets at any time of day and in any weather condition.

The Peregrine missile, says the company, benefits from the use of military off-the-shelf components, additive manufacturing (3D) processes, and readily available materials.

Rheinmetall laser reaches 20 kW The laser team at Rheinmetall Waffe Munition attained an optical power of 20 kilowatts (kW) with a laser technology based on spectral coupling. The laser source was constructed and commissioned in cooperation with NKT Photonics Technology. The core of the 20-kW laser source consists of twelve narrow-band fiber laser modules with nearly diffraction-limited beam quality.

In the spectral coupling unit, twelve individual beams from the laser fiber modules are coupled to form a single combined beam via a high-precision dielectric grid. The advantages of this coupling method include minimal performance dissipation, maintenance of the beam quality of the individual beams in the combined single beam, and scalability to higher performance levels by adding to the number of coupled laser fiber modules.

Rheinmetall now says that it possesses all relevant main assemblies needed for a modular, scalable 20-kW-class laser weapon system suitable for use in ground, air, and naval scenarios. www.mil-embedded.com

Figure 4 | The Peregrine air-to-air weapon increases firepower and maneuverability, say Raytheon officials. Raytheon photo.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

October 2019 13

Special Report SIGNAL PROCESSING FOR ISR SENSOR APPLICATIONS

ISR signal processing at the edge

By Emma Helfrich Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms such as the MV-22 Osprey pictured here will require state-of-the-art signal processing for its sensor systems. Photo by Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Mackenzie Binion.

Military users of signal processors seemingly want it all: parts that can process more data but be less detectable to the enemy, transmit data more quickly but don’t heat up from the effort, and operate at extremely powerful levels but are lightweight and ideally palm-sized. These requirements present an obvious challenge for engineers designing these processors for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) applications. The various solutions to these ISR demands involve artificial intelligence, machine learning, classification algorithms, and sensor fusion.

The amount of data that needs to be processed in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) applications is nearly endless and frequently comes from varying sources. Identifying specific objects of interest within this barrage of data requires a very sophisticated level of processing; on top of the sheer amount of material coming in, much of the information is often very sensitive.

“The amount of data to be processed continues to increase,” says Shaun McQuaid, director of product management at Mercury Systems in Andover, Massachusetts. “What we’re dealing with is often called a ‘big data problem,’ which needs to be solved on the platform itself, and I think this is a trend we’re seeing more and more of. In order to deal with big data problems, you have to be able to leverage a data center solution, which is what we’re focused on here.”

In other words, the ability to take that glut of sensor data and make sense out of it requires a huge amount of processing on the platform, a process that enables users to sift through the signals on the receiving end and decide which countermeasures should follow. All of this requires acquisition and translation of real-time ISR imagery – or quickly and efficiently making sense of the data being recorded – a processing capability that calls for significant speed and power.

These considerable modern-day processing requirements have led to what industry professionals claim to be revolutionary design characteristics. Driving the thought behind ISR processors’ builds now are trends including machine learning-enabled information extraction; significantly reduced size, weight, and power (SWaP); and

14 October 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

the ever-increasing demand for higher bandwidth.

“The ability to detect objects of interest, while filtering out noise and transmitters that you don’t want to see, requires a never-ending increase in the amount of processing capability needed,” says Denis Smetana, senior product manager, DSP products, at Curtiss-Wright in Ashburn, Virginia. “The trend has always been to continue to exploit and leverage new developments within computer architectures and capabilities.”

FPGAs display numerous possibilities The capabilities military customers are asking of design engineers are emphatically not cosmetic desires to have the newest, shiniest equipment. Industry professionals find that as threats become more frequent and sophisticated, so also must the pace of technology development advance. www.mil-embedded.com

processors (GPGPUs) tend to be better at going through a chain of command and doing more signal-type processing.

“In these ISR applications, you tend to have a mix of FPGAs or GPGPUs doing the parallel processing and generalpurpose x86-based processors doing the serial processing,” Smetana says.

“And what we’re seeing today is really a merging of technology where a mixture of FPGA, DSP, general-purpose processing such as ARM cores, and GPGPU cores may all exist within a single device.” (Figure 1.)

This seeming merger of technologies makes it so that instead of military customers asking for either GPU- or FPGAspecific solutions, the questions have now become centered around how they can work better together. This way, rather than manufacturers having to create a processor from scratch to meet the needs of the military customer, FPGAs instead become essentially programmable building blocks.

While the military is known to be slower to upgrade when it comes to the latest and greatest gear for a multitude of logistical reasons, the inability to keep up with the same technology international competitors are using is no longer an option.

“Everything is becoming agile, and the ability to do that quickly is our new mission,” says John Bratton, product and solutions marketing director at Mercury Systems. “What used to take weeks, months, years to address is now broken down into hours. Devices like field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) enable that kind of quick adaptation of technology. as does interoperability and scalability that is driven by standards like Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA).”

FPGAs – made up of hundreds of thousands of cells that are capable of being programmed to do nearly anything – by design are well-suited to perform parallel processing. If a lot of sensor data is arriving in parallel, FPGAs are good for repetitive functions on a wide array of input data streams coming in.

In contrast, general-purpose graphics www.mil-embedded.com

“What we’re talking about is an engineered building block,” McQuaid says.

“Mercury ruggedly packages GPGPU, FPGA, and data center processors with their associated memory into building blocks that they can quickly configure into open system architecture solutions in various standard form factors.”

(Figure 2.)

These advances make programming FPGAs more accessible to software engineers, which will prove to be hugely beneficial for the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in ISR signal processing.

The introduction of artificial intelligence “The computational horsepower required for this type of detection is much greater than traditional matchfiltering techniques in FPGAs, but by combining the strengths of FPGAs and GPUs, these systems are moving from the theoretical realm to the realm of practical reality,” says Phillip Henson, senior product manager, DSP, at Abaco Systems in Huntsville, Alabama. “The addition of dedicated logic to support deep neural networks in FPGAs is advancing their use in this space.”

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Figure 1 | Curtiss-Wright’s CHAMPXD1S 3U OpenXPX DSP module enables Intel, Xeon D, and Xilinx MPSoC FPGA processing with enhanced security.

Figure 2 | Mercury Systems’ systemon-chip module, custom form factor, 3U OpenVPX, 6U OpenVPX and AdvancedTCA are all compute elements for building into larger ISR processing systems.

Figure 3 | Abaco’s VP430 RFSoC board – which features Xilinx’s Zynq Ultrascale+ technology – is designed for use in advanced electronic warfare applications.

With the processing power offered by GPUs and FPGAs working together, engineers now see programming these processors with built-in machine learning (ML) capabilities built as more of an achievable feat. Xilinx in particular is one of the prominent players when it comes to integrating AI engines into its processors (Figure 3).

“Maybe there are signals that you might want to identify as they come in,” says Noah Donaldson, chief technical officer at Annapolis Microsystems in Annapolis, Maryland. “Previously, a human might have had to sit there and watch the data go by and observe a signal. Now, it’ll be easier and easier to program a machine to do that on its own.”

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

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Special Report

SIGNAL PROCESSING FOR ISR SENSOR APPLICATIONS

Artificial intelligence really becomes a pivotal capability when it comes to comprehending signal data that can be far too cryptic for a human to break down and understand. Complex combinations of frequencies, amplitudes, and signatures are difficult to physically see, but a processor can learn to pick those readings up and classify accordingly.

“With the use of artificial intelligence,” McQuaid says, “we can identify patterns, align them with past experience, and potentially come up with a countermeasure much more quickly than you could if you were looking at something for the first time.”

Manufacturers are also building autonomous platforms where all of the sensors plug into a central processing platform. This phenomenon, called sensor fusion, reduces the need for proprietary sensors that usually each have their own sensorprocessing chains.

“It’s much more efficient form a compute and hardware point of view,” Bratton says. “And it’s much more affordable and enables smaller platforms.”

SWaP plays an important role Constant calls to shrink the size of platforms and processors is a major design factor, as design engineers take the appropriate measures to ensure the parts operate at powerful levels, take up less space, and remain cool even at top operating speeds.

“There’s a desire to take the processing that used to be only available in a fairly large form-factor module, or set of modules, and squeeze it down to something that’s incredibly tiny; so trying to serve a whole range of small to large, there’s a lot of area to cover,” Smetana says. “So, it’s helpful to make the types of processing in between those ranges scalable, but it is challenging to use the same type of technology in that wide range of form factors.”

One major challenge that comes from shrinking the size of a high-powered processor: managing temperature. With larger form factors, keeping the machine cool is much easier to achieve than when military customers ask for a fast, powerful, and undetectable processor that also happens to be incredibly small. The constant requests for better thermal management are driving innovations in processor design and management (Figure 4).

“Cooling really does bring a lot to the table in terms of SWaP performance, and also delivers greater reliability and deterministic processing as throttling back is avoided,” Bratton says. “We’ve got some great cooling solutions, some of which are air-cooled using a management system instead of the traditional, unmanaged CFM approach, and liquid cooling, which often times can be the fuel on the platform itself.”

Industry attempts to manufacture universal SWaP solutions for processors will result not only in more overall reliability but will also create more opportunity for adaptability across platforms.

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MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

www.mil-embedded.com

A58_MilEmbSys_2_125x10.qxp_Layout 1 8/26/19

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Figure 4 | Pentek’s Model 6001 module QuartzXM eXpress module enables deployment in custom form factors and is available in ruggedized and conduction-cooled versions.

The SOSA effort has played a significant role in establishing these industrywide commonalities.

The influence of SOSA on signal processing The U.S. government’s SOSA initiative creates modular open systems architecture specifications to enable re-use of key sensor components across multiple platforms and services.

“Just like how you want to easily be able to upgrade your computer and maybe get a faster processor, they want to be able to do the same thing in their system,” Donaldson says. “That’s where things like the SOSA initiative help to achieve that easier upgrade path because it sets standards for how you design processing boards.” (Figure 5.)

What SOSA aims to do is set those standards so manufacturers and military customers alike can move on to the next-generation technology, unplug the old part, plug in the new part, and operate it more efficiently.

“This approach reduces the level of technical risk.” McQuaid says. “It also reduces schedule risk because we’re not building things from scratch; we’re taking an assembly of building blocks and putting them together to meet a particular need, which reduces cost because we don’t have to invest in a new solution every single time a new requirement comes along.”

Plug-and-play capabilities in ISR applications specifically foster an environment for expeditious fielding of technology.

Signals intelligence simply doesn’t have the luxury of waiting the 10 years www.mil-embedded.com

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Figure 5 | Annapolis MicroSystem’s WP6E10 is a 100 Gb ethernet switch that supports 1/10/25/40/100 GbE. The company offers a 100 GbE switch that is SOSA-aligned.

known to be typical of military system deployment.

Where DoD funding is headed As military threats continually evolve, it has become substantially more apparent to the Department of Defense (DoD) that ensuring warfighters are equipped with proper responses to such threats is critical.

“DoD funding is definitely rising in response to many real-world threats including ultrasonic missiles, unstable governments with nuclear weapons, persistent attacks on intellectual property, and terrorism,” says Rodger Hosking, vice president and cofounder of Pentek in Upper Saddle River, N.J. “Gaining better information through advanced ISR is essential in countering these threats.”

The goal for ISR signal processors is to see longer, farther, and more precisely than the opponent; getting there without financial help from the DoD would prove to be a challenge.

“It’s [government funding] trending upward in the area of electronic surveillance, for sure,” Abaco’s Henson says.

“As new techniques enable greater information to be obtained, and as our adversaries become more advanced, our capabilities must evolve that much more rapidly.” MES

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MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

October 2019 17

Special Report SIGNAL PROCESSING FOR ISR SENSOR APPLICATIONS

Next-generation military communications challenges

By Wyatt Taylor Military communications (MILCOM) has been the backbone for deployed soldiers since the Vietnam War. While these units have proven their capability and security for decades, the next generation of MILCOM platforms will need to leverage more modern communication technologies that have been developed to enable commercial platforms such as cellphones and Wi-Fi. A Marine with Charlie Company, Battalion Landing Team, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, speaks into a handheld radio during a simulated helicopter raid as part of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit’s MEU Exercise at Ie Shima Training Facility, Okinawa, Japan. U.S. Marine Corps photo.

Systems used for military communications (MILCOM) are often handheld units – walkie-talkies – with a push-totalk (PTT) button that the users can press when they need to relay a voice message.

When the PTT button is not depressed, an incoming voice message can be received from another walkie-talkie. The voice message relayed between two radios is modulated, encrypted, amplified, and transmitted wirelessly between the two soldiers. Many differences exist between these MILCOM walkie-talkies and a commercial cellphone or communication system, just a few of which are shown in Table 1.

Next-generation MILCOM platforms face the challenge of maintaining several of these critical differences, while closing some of the gaps between military and commercial communications systems.

18 October 2019

These MILCOM platforms will need to change from voice-only systems by adding data and text capability. This shift will enable the delivery of data such as mapping, images, and video to a soldier in the battlefield. The issue is that wider bandwidths create challenges for the radio platforms, primarily around size, weight, and power (SWaP).

The traditional radio frequency (RF) signal chains used by MILCOM platforms will not scale to wider bandwidths and digital modulation schemes without consuming much more power, and they will also increase in size and weight. This growth in SWaP is unacceptable to the soldier, who needs a smaller, more capable radio that can be powered for long mission durations on minimal battery power. Thus, next-generation Feature

Legacy MILCOM System

Commercial System

<25 kHz

<20 MHz

Frequency Coverage

<500 MHz

<6 GHz

Frequency Hopping

Various agility

Static frequency

<5 W

Typical 0.5 W

Voice only

Voice, SMS, data, location

FM, AM, MSK

QAM, QPSK, DSS

Bandwidth

Transmit Power Data Payload Modulation

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Table 1 | The contrast between MILCOM and commercial communications systems.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

www.mil-embedded.com

MILCOM platforms will require new RF signal chain architectures.

Shrinking the radio design One revolution in small-form-factor radio design has been integrated RF transceivers. Integrated transceivers reduce size and power by repartitioning the radio in several ways. First, RF and analog devices can be transferred to the digital domain – RF filters becoming digital filters, for instance. The digital implementations of these blocks are more efficient and more programmable than their RF counterparts.

THESE MILCOM PLATFORMS WILL NEED TO CHANGE FROM VOICE-ONLY SYSTEMS

BY ADDING DATA AND TEXT CAPABILITY. THIS SHIFT WILL ENABLE THE DELIVERY OF DATA SUCH AS MAPPING, IMAGES, AND VIDEO TO A SOLDIER IN THE BATTLEFIELD.

Second, discrete RF signal chains are often heterodyne architectures, which require several layers of frequency conversion, filtering, amplification, and digital sampling. Integrated transceivers can use a zero-intermediate frequency (ZIF) architecture that drastically reduces the required components in the signal chain, specifically the required filtering and amplification stages. Removing these stages reduces both size and power draw.

Finally, the ZIF architecture is a more efficient use of the digital converters, which in a wideband system can drive overall power consumption. While commercial platforms have been able to take advantage of ZIF transceivers for the last decade, the first products with MILCOM-applicable features have only come to market in the last few years.

What’s needed for the backbone of the MILCOM radio circuitry is integrated www.mil-embedded.com

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Figure 1 | ADRV9009 functional block diagram.

transceivers, which are making great strides toward providing single-chip solutions that will integrate the bulk of the receiver and transmitter signal chains while maintaining features such as frequency-hopping, AGC, and the ability to upgrade to future waveforms. Building on these transceivers as a core block of the radio will enable the next generation of MILCOM radio systems.

The ADRV9009 (Figure 1) is a CMOS transceiver with several MILCOM-appropriate features. First, the device is a native time duplex device (TDD), which is how a PTT architecture typically operates; this setup saves power compared to having two local oscillators (LO) in the device. The integrated LO supports frequency-hopping natively in the transceiver, both from a frequency-generation perspective and a calibration perspective.

The usable bandwidth can be programmed between 20 MHz and 200 MHz, enabling a range of wide bandwidth operating modes. It’s also waveform-agnostic, which means that it delivers RF to bits with no limits on what waveform is used; this will allow for implementation of waveforms that are available both now and those introduced in the future. Finally, the ADRV9009 integrates several auxiliary features into the transceiver.

Automatic gain control (AGC) is critical for optimizing the receiver dynamic range, and the ADRV9009 has an internal AGC loop with 30 dB of range. Temperature sensors, control converters, and general-purpose outputs (GPOs) are also integrated into the device to save space in the MILCOM radio system.

MES Wyatt Taylor is a senior RF systems engineer with Analog Devices, located in Greensboro, North Carolina. He is focused on aerospace and defense radio applications, with a particular emphasis on integrated RF transceivers, small-form-factor microwave design, and software-defined radio (SDR). Formerly, Wyatt was an RF design engineer at Thales Communications, Inc., and Digital Receiver Technology, Inc. in the Maryland area.

Wyatt received his M.S.E.E. and B.S.E.E. from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Readers may reach him at wyatt.taylor@analog.com.

Analog Devices, Inc. • www.analog.com

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

October 2019 19

Mil Tech Trends VIRTUALIZATION FOR EMBEDDED COMPUTING

Virtualization improves efficiency of legacy military embedded systems

By Sally Cole, Senior Editor Virtualizing legacy embedded systems improves their performance, efficiency, and security, as well as helping to meet size, weight, and power requirements for military aircraft and ground vehicles.

The U.S. Department of Defense owns myriad “legacy” embedded systems that are being given a new lease on life, thanks to the wonders of virtualization.

“Virtualization is a must-have capability in next-generation software-based military systems,” says Ray Petty, vice president of aerospace and defense for Wind River (Alameda, California). “It enables the use of multiple application and operating system environments on a shared compute platform by abstracting away the exact computer architecture from the applications – removing underlying hardware and software dependencies on both new and legacy applications. It also enables the use of a single compute platform to be used by multiple applications from different domains and suppliers.”

What exactly does a virtualization platform do? Wind River happens to offer one called the Helix Virtualization Platform, which is an adaptive software environment that consolidates multi-operating systems and mixed-criticality applications onto a single compute software platform to simplify, secure, and future-proof designs within the aerospace and defense markets. Applications can be legacy or new-capability, based on industrial standards such as ARINC 653, POSIX, or FACE, and run on operating systems such as Linux, VxWorks, and others.

The virtualization of military systems is already well underway, because “it addresses many of the military’s software development, test, and security concerns,” Petty says.

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MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Benefits of virtualization for embedded systems Virtualization offers many benefits for embedded systems – especially legacy military ones.

“Virtualization is an amazing technology,” says Chris Ciufo, chief technology officer for General Micro Systems. “While it’s not new, it’s only within the past five to 10 years that processors and the systems that run them have had enough performance and resources so that when you virtualize you still have enough processing capability left over to do other things.”

Virtualization “decouples legacy hardware and software dependencies and allows for rapidly repurposing mission platforms,” Petty says. “It also enables systems at the edge to have dynamic www.mil-embedded.com

on-the-fly information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT). This is ideal for rapidly changing security, warfare environments, or where there is a high failure or degradation rate of capabilities.”

For a virtualization platform to be most efficient, “it must allow applications using a broad range of commercial and proprietary guest operating systems to run without penalty,” Petty adds.

“Virtualized systems should also enable the continued use of legacy software applications while combining them with new capabilities within new operating environments.”

The biggest benefit virtualization provides, according to Chip Downing, senior market development director of aerospace and defense for RTI (Sunnyvale, California), is that a systems integrator can now take a legacy system, typically on a standalone or federated system, and deploy it into a shared compute platform that’s more modern and can be more easily upgraded.

“Now we can have legacy and new applications, each with their own operating system and application libraries, running on a virtualized compute platform,” explains Downing. “Once you have a virtualization layer underneath these different applications and operating systems, the potential to upgrade that platform is very attractive – you can simply install new hardware with the virtualization layer and run the existing set of applications. This should incur very little change, except for potentially higher performance of the different applications on the platform due to more modern and typically faster processors.

It enables performing upgrades much easier and allows you to give aging legacy platforms a new life through virtualization on the latest hardware.”

Multicore hardware “is driving a huge change in embedded systems where traditionally we had an embedded system with just one processor, one scheduler or RTOS, and one set of applications,” Downing says. “Now, we can virtualize and consolidate the different platforms onto one shared compute platform.” www.mil-embedded.com

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Figure 1 | Virtualizing traditionally separate operations can bring beneficial SWaP benefits to such applications as military aircraft, ground vehicles, or unmanned aerial systems.

Downing points out that a rich ecosystem of suppliers – DDC-I, Green Hills Software, Lynx Software, Sysgo, Star Lab, and Wind River – have created embedded virtualization platforms with RTCA DO-178C and EUROCAE ED-12C airborne safety-certification evidence.

This means a huge improvement in efficiency when it comes to military aircraft, ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, or other platforms with an assortment of federated boxes and strict size, weight, and power (SWaP) restrictions. (Figure 1.) “By virtualizing these traditionally federated embedded applications on a new compute platform, you can vastly reduce SWaP,” Downing adds. “And platforms with certification evidence systems integrators can mix high levels of criticality with low levels of criticality – whether it’s safety or security – on a shared compute platform. This has extremely high value and can save tens of millions of dollars during the life of an airborne system.”

Virtualization not only makes it possible to reduce SWaP on military manned or unmanned aircraft, ground vehicles, and other weight-sensitive military equipment, but also improves its operating characteristics and energy consumption. “The traditional way to add capability was to add another federated box containing that capability, which increased platform weight and power consumption,” Downing says.

“Military systems integrators can now virtualize both the legacy and new software on a shared compute platform and add new capability by simply adding another software partition, not an entire new box of capability. This decreases cost of deployment and increases the efficiency of the military platform during its service lifetime. Virtualization also enables the rapid response to new threats by enabling the insertion of new capabilities in very compressed time frames.”

The overall appeal of virtualizing legacy systems is that “you can have essentially the same legacy system, which looks like it’s still running on the older system, processor, and environment, but it’s now running on a shiny new processor and system that can also be doing many other things,” Ciufo says. “This means that legacy systems can be kept alive a lot longer without many changes – saving the government, the contractor, the prime, etc. the cost of recertifying a system. It’s a tremendous benefit to the defense industry because it often costs more to recertify a system than to redesign it.

Virtualization is a boon for modern defense systems when it can be used.”

What does virtualizing embedded systems mean for security?

Virtualizing embedded systems is primarily viewed as a way to make them more secure by essentially creating a moving target, but it can potentially expand the attack surface – depending on how connected the systems or devices are.

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Mil Tech Trends

VIRTUALIZATION FOR EMBEDDED COMPUTING

Embedded systems can be more secure “because a virtualized platform has an abstraction layer that enables the reliable movement of software operating systems and applications from platform to platform,” Downing says. “Traditionally, you just had one target, one operating system, one processor. If someone worked at it long enough they could figure out a way to break into it. Virtualization allows you to move those applications around – throughout an aircraft or system. It’s a moving target because it’s abstracted away now; it’s not just running on bare hardware. Even if you’re able to compromise the hardware and take advantage of a security flaw in the hardware platform, there is now a virtualization layer above the hardware, providing one more layer, and possibly a dynamic layer, that separates an application environment and its adversaries.”

On the other hand, “Embedded devices and systems have traditionally run in relative isolation and were protected from a wide range of security threats,” Petty says. “Today’s devices and systems are often connected to corporate networks, public clouds, or the Internet directly.”

Defense and intelligence networks will likely “embrace cloud capabilities and leverage commercial smartphone platforms while maintaining highly secure domains,” he points out. “This wide connectivity yields substantial gains in functionality and usability but also makes devices more vulnerable to attack, intrusion, and exploitation.”

The “connected era” is elevating secure connectivity to an essential system requirement, which wasn’t necessarily a top priority in the past. “Often, the embedded hardware and software from previous-generation devices weren’t designed to enable secure connections or to include network security components, such as firewalls, intrusion protection, or other security-focused functionality,” Petty adds. “Developers can’t assume network environments will be private and protected, nor can they predict how their devices might be connected in the field. They also can’t predict the impact of future connected devices on their products.”

The most efficient way to find the right balance between device capability and security “is by defining and prioritizing the device security requirements with the rest of the system and its development environment, including the network environment,” Petty says. “For maximum efficiency, this should be done early in the product life cycle.”

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Figure 2 | Trends in virtualization point toward certification of safety and security of hypervisors on multicore processors, which means that avionics and other mission-critical platforms can keep pace with hardware innovations.

22 October 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Emerging trends One major trend is that “software-defined open virtualization solutions are proving to be a smarter way to implement nextgen military systems, since they’re easier to maintain and enable future software and hardware upgrades with minimal risks, costs, and downtime,” Petty says.

Today’s embedded microprocessors “have hardware-assisted virtualization IP that supports full operating system environments in virtualized machines within a shared compute environment,” he adds.

“Although this capability has existed in enterprise and IT spaces for more than a decade, it’s just now becoming commonplace in embedded devices and OT [operational technology] environments.

The reduced SWaP-C requirements make using virtualization a very attractive alternative for next-gen designs.”

Another virtualization trend, while not exactly new, is a positive sign for military embedded systems: “Companies are figuring out how to certify the safety and security of hypervisors on multicore processors,” Downing says. “This is encouraging because avionics and other critical platforms can now keep up with innovations in hardware.” (Figure 2.)

For a few years, “simply doing a dualcore or quad-core was problematic, but the industry has now figured out how to solve the multicore contention and interference issues,” Downing adds. “It’s a huge trend because we can get a lot more capability into an embedded device now that it’s multicore and supports a wide range of operating systems and applications. Plus, these platforms can support not only a real-time operating system but also a larger operating system, like Linux, and run it on that virtualized platform. With this technology foundation in place, we can then easily upgrade that platform at a future date without disrupting the existing code.”

A really interesting new trend is the use of data distribution service (DDS) within virtualized multicore environments. “In the past, as companies integrated applications onto single-core ARINC 653 www.mil-embedded.com

platforms, the demand for DDS waned because the ARINC 653 environment reliably managed the communications between the application partitions,” Downing says. “Now, with consolidated multicore platforms, the need for realtime communications between applications with a reliable quality of service capability is increasing because of the complexity of multicore processors and the potential multicore contention and interference that occurs with a mixed operating system virtualization environment. It’s literally a distributed system that needs a robust connectivity foundation to manage the interoperability between virtualized applications. The new distributed system is now a virtualized multicore platform.”

Another emerging trend in virtualization now is to add peripherals “that hadn’t previously been accessible to the microprocessor,” Ciufo says. “Early on, virtualization primarily relied on multicore

www.mil-embedded.com

processors to run multiple synthetic environments – typically one per core. Then Ethernet ports were virtualized so that eight Ethernet ports can be shared with four virtualized environments, which makes it look like 32 ports are available to the system.”

Ciufo says he is also noticing an effort to virtualize other processing resources and systems like general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPUs) or other digital signaling assets in the system known as coprocessors, which include algorithm processors, artificial intelligence processors, and vector processors. “These high-performance resources to the system do a lot of computational work,” he notes.

“So the trend now is to virtualize algorithm processors like digital signal processors, GPGPU processors, and other compute resources that previously were dedicated to a processor but now have enough horsepower to also be virtualized and shared between synthetic environments.”

This is significant, according to Ciufo, because these coprocessing algorithm resources tend to be bolted to only one part of the system. It will “require new software to be written, and virtual environment providers will need to describe within their software how they plan to deal with talking to data moving to and from those virtualized resources,” he says. “Since these are high-performance resources that work very quickly in terms of data throughput and movement, it also requires the virtualization companies that provide the software to rethink how they deal with their own passing of data in and out of the virtualized environment – including the interrupts that are required to deal with those resources. So it’s not a trivial task, but we’re definitely seeing a trend of using high-powered coprocessor compute resources and virtualizing them too.” MES

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

October 2019 23

Mil Tech Trends VIRTUALIZATION FOR EMBEDDED COMPUTING

Optimized virtualization for embedded computing

By Richard Jaenicke Many embedded systems already employ system virtualization, decoupling virtual and physical systems through the use of virtual machines (VMs). Virtualization in mission-critical embedded systems can be implemented using technologies similar to those used for enterprise systems, but the different use cases of embedded virtualization open the door to additional solutions that align more closely with priorities of embedded systems.

Virtualization has been deployed widely in enterprise servers since the early 2000s.

That initial drive for server virtualization was all about server consolidation, which combines services from multiple, underutilized servers running different applications onto one computer. Reducing the number of servers resulted in savings for both capital and operating costs. Such consolidation requires workload isolation that separates applications from each other and the rest of the system, thereby providing some level of security and application autonomy. Because virtual machines (VMs) pair applications with the operating system they rely upon, virtualization can also allow the migration of VMs from one server to another, enabling high availability, load balancing, and additional power savings in a variety of mission-critical military applications.

A secondary drive for server virtualization was the ability to run applications designed for a different operating system (OS) or different versions of the OS. For example, it is common for an engineering workstation running Linux to also run Microsoft Windows to interact with business applications. This was particularly useful for supporting legacy systems, such as when migrating from a mainframe to a server.

Use cases for embedded virtualization Embedded virtualization has much overlap with enterprise use cases but with different priorities and additional requirements. The primary use cases for embedded virtualization are supporting heterogeneous OSes and increased security. Secondary use cases can include workload consolidation, software license segregation, and facilitating the move to multicore processors. A common driver for supporting heterogeneous OSes is the need to support general OSes such as Linux and Windows for some applications while the critical and trusted applications run on a real-time OS (RTOS). Increased

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security is particularly important in systems with mixed criticality to isolate the less-critical applications from the ones with more critical real-time, safety, or security requirements.

When assessing a security solution, a key concept is the size of the trusted computing base (TCB) that is comprised of the hardware, software, and controls that enforce the security policy. The general goal is to minimize the size of the TCB and number of interfaces so that it can be verified more easily. The larger the TCB and number of interfaces, the larger the attack surface is. Minimizing the TCB requires moving many noncritical services out of the TCB, which in turn requires both the ability to isolate those services and to provide secure communication between trusted and nontrusted components. Note that minimizing the TCB is not the end goal but only a means to ease verification. For systems requiring high security, the end www.mil-embedded.com

goal is certification to applicable security assurance requirements.

device assigned to a particular VM is not accessible to other VMs nor can the I/O device access the other VMs.

Unlike VMs in server virtualization, the applications in an embedded system often are highly integrated and need to cooperate. Subsequently, part of the solution needs to include predictable low-latency, high-bandwidth communication paths with permissions enforced by a secure TCB. For embedded realtime systems in particular, meeting the virtualization goals of heterogeneous OSes and increased security cannot come at the expense of determinism of the system or greatly increased latencies. That is doubly true for safety-critical systems. Maintaining determinism presents a challenge for any virtualization solution because efficient virtualization implementations generally use heuristics to recognize variations in code sequences across different OSes and different versions of a given OS.

Even with IOMMU support, the VMM still needs to copy data from the network interface chip (NIC) to the virtual machine or vice-versa. The Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) standard from PCI-SIG removes the VMM from the process of moving data to and from the VM. Data is DMAd directly to and from the VM without the software switch in the VMM ever touching it.

Although the key technologies for hardware acceleration of virtualization are implemented at the chip level, board-level decisions also affect the system performance.

For example, processors with the most virtualization features often are the ones consuming the most power, so there is often a tradeoff decision for optimizing size, weight, and power (SWaP). Selection of the NIC affects which I/O virtualization features are accelerated. The amount of memory on the board is also an important consideration, as virtualization can consume large amounts of memory.

Hardware support for virtualization Early virtualization of x86 processors was notoriously low-performance because of the lack of hardware support for virtualization, including virtualized memory management unit (MMU) and input/output memory management unit (IOMMU).

Modern processors provide support for hardware-assisted virtualization. One example is Intel VT-x and VT-d.

Intel VT-x provides instructions for entering and exiting a virtual execution mode where the guest OS sees itself as running with full privilege, while the host OS remains protected. Memory virtualization actually requires two levels of virtualization. First, the guest OS stores the mapping from physical to virtual address space in page tables. That guest OS does not have direct access to the physical memory so the virtual machine monitor (VMM) needs to provide virtualization of those page tables. For Intel processors, acceleration of page table virtualization is called Extended Page Tables (EPT).

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October 2019 25

Mil Tech Trends

VIRTUALIZATION FOR EMBEDDED COMPUTING

Embedded virtualization technologies Once the need for virtualization has been established and supported by the underlying hardware, the next question is what software virtualization technology to use.

In the enterprise space, the main choices are Type 1 (Figure 1) and Type 2 hypervisors, where Type 1 runs on bare metal and Type 2 runs on top of another OS. For embedded systems there is a third choice: microkernels with a virtualization layer.

Although it is convenient to put any given solution into one of those three buckets, the reality is that there is a gray zone between Type 1 and Type 2, and Type 1 hypervisors can be implemented using microkernel technology. Even with some degree of overlap, it is useful to look at defining characteristics and capabilities.

Hypervisors, also called virtual machine monitors (VMMs), got their start in enterprise systems with little in the way of resource constraints. As such, many hypervisors and their VMs are heavyweight constructs that often include capabilities such as device drivers and sometimes even networking stacks and file systems. All that functionality requires a large TCB. Networking stacks are particularly high security risk, as seen with the recent “URGENT/11” vulnerabilities. For both Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors, a guest OS runs inside the VMs along with the applications. Although Type 1 hypervisors running on bare metal are generally more efficient, Type 2 hypervisors can be the right solution if only a small percentage of the applications need a guest OS. In an enterprise context, one example is an engineering environment (for example, Linux) or a creative environment (like macOS) that needs to run a business application that runs only on Windows. Similarly, embedded systems often have a mix of real-time and non-real-time requirements. Using Type 2 hypervisor, the larger set of real-time applications would only rely on the base RTOS, instead of an RTOS and a hypervisor, while only the non-real-time applications would incur the virtualization overhead with a guest OS, hypervisor, and host OS. Microkernels came from a different direction, aiming to reduce the amount of code executing in the kernel by moving services, including virtualization, to user-mode servers. This also minimizes the TCB to improve both safety and security. A virtualization layer providing guest OS support can be implemented in user space, similar to a Type 2 hypervisor, along with the network stack and file system. Note that the isolation foundation is implemented in the microkernel, including use of the hardware virtualization features.

Getting the virtualization layer out of the trusted computing base is a significant advantage for both security and safety, as virtualization code can be huge. To enable a guest OS to think it is running on bare metal, every part of the system must be

Re me App 1

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Guest RTOS

Guest RTOS

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Guest OS (e.g., Linux)

Type-1 Hypervisor Hardware System

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Figure 1 | With a Type 1 hypervisor, all applications run on two layers of software, the hypervisor and a guest OS, which incurs extra latency and variability in execution time.

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MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

virtualized. Although the hardware technologies accelerate memory virtualization, only recently are some processors beginning to accelerate some portions of I/O. Some examples of needed virtualization include device emulation, bus emulation, and interrupt emulation and routing. The code for all that emulation is quite large and also creates a performance penalty. Every call to the kernel from the guest OS needs to be trapped, examined, and determined if the guest OS is permitted that access. In order for a hypervisor to be efficient, it needs to virtualize sequences of instructions instead of single instructions. Such lookahead capability is just one example of increasing the already large code base of a hypervisor in pursuit of minimizing the virtualization performance penalty.

One specific type of microkernel is the separation kernel, which allocates all exported resources under its control into partitions, and those partitions are isolated except for explicitly allowed information flows. Separation kernels that are designed for the highest security meet the Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP) defined by U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), which was created for the most hostile threat environments.

Comparison of hypervisor and microkernel technology Today, there is great deal of overlap between the broad set of features in hypervisors and microkernels with a virtualization layer. Both technologies utilize the underlying hardware features such as multiple privilege modes/levels, MMUs, and IOMMUs to provide hardwareenforced isolation and give separate address spaces to different applications.

Both hypervisors and microkernels with a virtualization layer each provide the ability to run multiple OSes in a virtualized environment, including mixing RTOSes and non-RTOSes. Even with those similarities, the two technologies can have significant differences in levels of determinism and security.

Microkernel-based RTOSes were designed from the beginning for low latency and high determinism. Running an RTOS on top of a hypervisor adds latency for every system call that has to be interwww.mil-embedded.com

cepted and virtualized. The result is increased latency and lower determinism.

To address this, some hypervisors claim to allow running on bare metal, but that is really a misnomer. Even when there is no guest OS, applications still have to run on the hypervisor, which is typically larger than a microkernel. Running on just a hypervisor without a guest OS also means there are no tasking services, no semaphores, and no message passing.

applications can run on top of the virtualization layer without increasing the size of the codebase required for certification. (Figure 2.)

Security is often the most cited reason for considering a hypervisor. It is a common misconception that hypervisors are inherently secure because they utilize hardware to enforce virtual address spaces and virtual I/O to isolate VMs. First, other technologies, such as partitioning operating systems and separation kernels, also use the same hardware features to enforce isolation. However, the primary consideration for security is

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In the case of safety-critical systems, a hypervisor-based solution needs both the safety-critical OS and the hypervisor certified to the highest level of criticality of any of the hosted applications. The total size of that codebase creates a substantial certification burden compared to a microkernel and presents an unnecessary risk.

Alternatively, microkernels with a virtualization layer achieve higher performance by limiting the virtualization side-effects of higher latency and decreased determinism to only the applications that do not run the host microkernel RTOS. In a safety-critical system, the noncritical

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October 2019 27

Mil Tech Trends

VIRTUALIZATION FOR EMBEDDED COMPUTING

that the full solution is only as secure as the underlying software. Hypervisors have been shown to be susceptible to flaws that could allow code execution through buffer overflows and other exploits. For example, the Spectre vulnerability revealed in early 2018 can trick a hypervisor into leaking secrets to a guest application. Because hypervisors run below the guest operating system, a compromised hypervisor is not detectable by the VM. Such exploits even have a catchy name: hyperjacking.

Microkernels have a smaller TCB, and those using separation kernel technology can have the highest levels of security and isolation. The proof of that security level is certification to the SKPP published by the NSA or similar security standards such as Common Criteria EAL6. Some hypervisors include some separation kernel principles to improve security, but no hypervisor has been certified to the SKPP or similar security standards such as Common Criteria EAL6. For systems that require isolation but not virtualization, a microkernel-based separation kernel provides the highest level of security without the overhead and extended code base of a hypervisor.

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Optimizing for performance, security An example of a virtualization solution optimized for both the highest real-time performance and the highest security is the INTEGRITY-178 tuMP RTOS from Green Hills Software, a microkernelbased separation kernel with full virtualization services including the ability to run multiple guest operating systems without modification. As opposed to hypervisor-based virtualization solutions, real-time applications can run directly on this RTOS without a virtualization layer penalty in terms of latency or determinism.

As a separation kernel, the RTOS fully isolates multiple applications/partitions and controls the information flow between applications/partitions and external resources. In part, that includes protection of all resources from unauthorized access, isolation of partitions except for explicitly allowed information flows, and a set of audit services. The result is that a separation kernel provides highassurance partitioning and information flow control that satisfy the NEAT [nonbypassable, evaluatable, always invoked, and tamperproof] security policy attributes.

INTEGRITY-178 is the only commercial OS or hypervisor that has ever achieved certification to the SKPP published by the NSA as well as Common Criteria EAL6+.

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Rich Jaenicke is director of marketing for safety and security-critical products at Green Hills Software.

Prior to Green Hills, he served as director of strategic marketing and alliances at Mercury Systems, and held marketing and technology positions at XCube, EMC, and AMD. Rich earned an MS in computer systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BA in computer science from Dartmouth College.

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Industry Spotlight LEVERAGING GALLIUM NITRIDE (G A N) TECHNOLOGY FOR MILITARY RADAR

The benefits and challenges of using GaN technology in AESA radar systems

By Mario LaMarche Soldiers with Bravo Battery, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment, prepare a Patriot missile radar for movement to another field location under a Table VII assessment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The U.S. Army completed a “sense-off” capabilities demonstration of prototype radars during June 2019; the Army is looking to replace the radar with a next-generation system in the near term. (Photo: Gary Sheftick and U.S. Army.)

As the trend in the development of new radar systems shifts away from dish antennas and towards active electronically steered arrays (AESA), there is a growing need for high-power signal amplification distributed across the array.

Whereas mechanically steered dish radars can use a single high-power amplifier to drive the antenna, AESA systems require multiple, compact power amplifiers. Achieving this level of high output power in a small space requires a solution with high power density and wide bandwidth – an ideal use case for gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductor technology. However, while GaNbased amplifiers offer substantial benefit, their implementation is not without challenge.

30 October 2019

Unlike mechanically steered radar systems that determine the target’s location based on the physical orientation of the antenna, active electronically steered array (AESA) systems adjust the relative phase of each antenna element to steer the beam. This offers multiple advantages: For example, compared to a dish antenna it is much easier to mount a planar array to the body of an aircraft. Additionally, AESA radars offer more direct control over the direction of the beam and some even support multiple beams.

This allows advanced radar capabilities to be deployed in new platforms while maximizing the ability to track difficult-to-detect threats. However, compared to a simple rotating dish antenna, implementing an AESA radar requires more advanced circuitry.

In particular, each element of the AESA requires a transmit/receive (TR) module (Figure 1) that includes a phase shifter, switching circuity, a high-power amplifier for the transmit signal, and a low-noise amplification for the receive signal.

One of the most critical figures of merit for the AESA system is the range. In order for an object to be within the range of the radar, the reflected signal must be above the noise floor of the receiver, which we quantify by using the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) calculation.

Most simply, optimizing the SNR of the TR module involves minimizing the noise figure of the receiver and maximizing the output power of the transmitter. While this sounds straightforward, it is complicated by the size constraints of the TR module and the need for high-frequency, wideband operation. Typically, the TR modules are arranged in a grid and placed behind the antenna elements. In order to fit all the TR modules, the height and width of each module is limited by the size of the individual antenna elements. As the operational frequency increases, the size of the antenna decreases. For example, at X-band the height and width of the TR module would be less than 2 cm.

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www.mil-embedded.com

Summarizing the design criteria: The TR module must be very small, have high output power, have a low noise figure, and operate at high frequencies. Clearly, maximizing the performance of TR modules is a significant challenge; however, it’s made easier through the use of GaN semiconductor technology.

GaN technology for TR modules Gallium nitride, or GaN, is a semiconductor material with high breakdown voltage and high electron mobility.

Similar to gallium arsenide (GaAs), the high electron mobility enables high frequency operation; unlike GaAs, however, the high breakdown voltage of GaN supports high electric field strength in the device. By operating at a higher voltage, GaN-based amplifiers are able to provide a much higher output power in a smaller space. (Figure 2.)

Using GaN technology in the design of the TR module’s power amplifier maximizes the transmit output power while www.mil-embedded.com

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Figure 1 | Simplified block diagram of a TR module.

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Figure 2 | Examples of various GaN-based amplifiers. Image: Mercury Systems.

minimizing the physical size. In addition to shrinking the size of the amplifier die, the use of high-power GaN reduces the need to use many lower-power devices. Since the passive combining networks that are used to combine multiple die are large and introduce loss into the signal path, having fewer of them improves the power density in the TR module.

In addition to providing a high output power in a small space, the power amplifier in the TR module must be capable of operating at high frequencies. Depending on the specific applications, the radar may need to operate at X-band or even Ka-band.

While there are other semiconductor materials that offer high power density, such as LDMOS, GaN is the best option for high-frequency operation. As an added benefit, GaN devices not only enable high-frequency operation, they also are an ideal choice for wide bandwidths.

In order to ensure effective operation, the AESA radar must include functionality to protect it against the effects of electronic attack. This is especially important as the technology to jam radars is becoming increasingly available. One method of achieving this resiliency is to operate the radar over a wide range of frequencies. Also, by modulating the frequency across a single pulse, known as chirp, the resolution of the radar can be improved. However, this requires the TR module to operate over a wider band of frequencies. Not only does GaN offer high power density, but when compared to GaAs, the higher bias voltage of GaN simplifies the process of designing a broadband

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

October 2019 31

Industry Spotlight

LEVERAGING GALLIUM NITRIDE (G A N) TECHNOLOGY FOR MILITARY RADAR

impedance match. This enables a single GaN amplifier to operate over a wide bandwidth, enabling robust and multifunction AESA systems.

The higher bias voltage of GaN offers an additional benefit at the circuit level. Since power is the product of voltage and current, for a constant power, the higher bias voltage of GaN leads to lower current. When the current is reduced, the loss in the bias circuit is also reduced, which improves the efficiency of the amplifier.

GaN technology – while it can improve the performance of the output amplifier in the TR module – can also be used on the receive side. It’s a fact that maximizing the SNR requires both increasing the signal strength and decreasing the noise; when the receiver chain is examined, one source of noise is the protection limiter at the input to the low-noise amplifier since each dB of loss in the limiter equates to an additional dB of noise figure. By using GaN as the semiconductor material for the LNA, it is possible to design out the limiter since GaN can withstand higher input voltages without damage. This leads to a net improvement in the receiver’s noise figure, maximizing the SNR and the range of the radar system. Also, by removing the limiter from the design there is more space in the TR module for other circuitry.

Challenges of using GaN technology While the benefits afforded by leveraging GaN technology in AESA TR modules are significant, the design and manufacturing processes are far more complex than simply removing a GaAs device and inserting a GaN device. In addition to developing techniques to manage the high levels of heat generated in such a small area, successfully using GaN technology requires an understanding of the many subtleties specific to this semiconductor material.

Managing heat and circuitry The main benefit of GaN technology also leads to the main challenge: While high power density enables new applications, it also requires managing the heat generated by the devices. For example, consider a 30 W GaN amplifier die with a bias of 2.5 A at 28 V. This results in 40 W of power dissipation in a device not much larger than 10 mm square.

Managing this level of heat generation requires focused attention at each thermal interface, since even a small increase in thermal resistance results in a significant device temperature rise, degrading the long-term reliability. The first step in ensuring effective thermal management is optimizing the attachment of the GaN die to the baseplate.

For example, using a gold-tin eutectic die attach process will provide much better thermal conductivity than silver epoxy. Additionally, the attachment process must be carefully controlled to prevent the formation of air voids under

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the pulsed nature of radar requires the bias circuity to support fast-switching gate current.

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Figure 3 | C-SAM image showing poor die attach due to excessive voiding.

These two examples – thermal management and bias circuitry – highlight just a few of the challenges encountered when using GaN in amplifier design. Since every design is unique, the opportunities for technical issues are unlimited. In order to achieve the many benefits made possible by GaN, the design and manufacturing teams must have the experience and technical knowledge to overcome the challenges and come up with innovative solutions.

MES

Mario LaMarche is product marketing manager for Mercury Systems.

He previously worked at Teledyne Microwave Solutions and Samtec as product line manager and engineer. Mario holds MS and BS degrees in electrical engineering/RF and microwave design. Readers may reach Mario at mario.lamarche@mrcy.com.

Mercury Systems www.mrcy.com

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Figure 4 | C-SAM image showing a successful die attach.

the die. To ensure the quality of the die attach, confocal scanning acoustic microscopy (C-SAM) can be used to check for voiding that would reduce the thermal conductivity and cause an unacceptable temperature increase in the device. (Figure 3 and Figure 4.)

Moving away from the device, we also need to maximize the thermal conductivity between the baseplate and the housing body. For lower power applications we often see die installed on a Kovar baseplate due to its matched coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE).

However, for high-power applications, a material such as copper molybdenum is likely a better choice as it offers lower thermal resistance.

In addition to the thermal challenges, designing an amplifier using GaN technology requires careful attention to the bias circuity. Whereas for GaAs devices, the gate current is negligible, for GaN the gate of the device draws significant current. Accommodating this current requires bias circuity with low series resistance and the capability of sourcing current. As an additional challenge, www.mil-embedded.com

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October 2019 33

FACE & SOSA Update

Government and industry partnership driving FACE & SOSA success

By John McHale, Editorial Director Despite doubt from some corners since inception, the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) and Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) consortia are not simply surviving, they are flourishing.

Last month I attended the U.S. Air Forcehosted FACE & SOSA Expo and Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) event in Dayton, Ohio: The event was buzzing with a crowded expo floor and at-capacity conference rooms.

The meeting gathered more than 500 attendees, while the Expo had 56 exhibits, including demos of FACEconformant products and integrations, says Richard Jaenicke, Director, Marketing, Safety and Security-Critical Products at Green Hills Software (Santa Barbara, California). Green Hills Software sponsored this event.

The initial doubts I mentioned above were fueled by similar efforts over the last several decades that did not succeed due to a lack of cooperation between the different branches of the military plus a lack of enthusiasm from industry. That is not the case with FACE and SOSA, however, as the end users – Air Force, Army, and Navy – are working together to drive these efforts.

In fact, military organizations now count themselves as members of such openstandards organizations as VITA. (See our three-part series on the tri-services convergence for more details.)

Enthusiasm for the consortia is also now seen from prime contractors and system integrators. “The SOSA Consortium is developing a unified modular open reference architecture – and associated business model – for radar, EO/IR, SIGINT, electronic warfare, and communications,” said Raytheon’s Dr. Steven A. Davidson, who is Vice Chair of the SOSA Steering Committee, in his SOSA Overview presen-

34 October 2019

tation at the event. “It makes economic sense,” adding that military collaboration with industry is a “win-win ... and for the most part we are aligned in every way.”

FACE reduces cost and time to fielding, said Jeffrey Howington of Collins Aerospace and FACE Steering Committee Vice Chair, during his FACE Overview presentation. Right now, Howington said, “about 70% to 90% of aircraft avionics capability is implemented in software.”

That level is unaffordable and unsustainable. By leveraging the FACE Technical Standard, platforms will be able to continue improving capability throughout their life cycle without incurring astronomical software development cost, such as with the F-35.

This commonality permits life cycle competition from many players in the marketplace by creating an environment for portable, reusable software, Howington explained. The effort is ongoing: “There are now 19 FACE-certified conformant products from 12 different suppliers in the FACE registry, which lists FACEConformant Certified software components. Companies cannot publicly market their software as FACE-Conformant without being listed in the Registry. [This enables] customers to independently confirm that a software product is FACEConformant Certified.”

The success of FACE also paved the way for SOSA. “The SOSA standard is rapidly becoming real,” said Chip Downing, Senior Market Development Director, Aerospace & Defense at RTI and Chair, FACE Consortium Outreach Subcommittee. “This was the SOSA standard’s first external public event, and it had wide interest from a range of suppliers and users. The SOSA team was smart,” Downing said, as “they leveraged the best of the FACE Technical Standard and business approach and built upon that foundation. Their challenge is larger – the

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

SOSA standard is for both hardware and software. Creating standardized hardware typically is a much larger investment that must have a market size that will justify the investment. And they need to get it right because the cost of changes (and errors) is higher.”

The cost can also be the success of adversaries, who also use COTS and continue to mature their systems. The U.S and its allies must stay ahead of the opposition; enabling commonality in future designs through open standards will aid in that effort.

Howington made just that point in his presentation when quoting Vice Admiral (ret.) Arthur K. Cebrowski, “You have a choice: You can either create your own future, or you can become the victim of a future that someone else creates for you.”

Next up for FACE and SOSA SOSA technology will next be demonstrated at The Tri-Service Open Architecture Interoperability Demonstration (TSOA-ID), an exclusive event for media, the acquisition community, and industry influencers, on Wednesday, January 29, 2020, at the Georgia Tech Research Institute Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Joining tri-service representatives will be industry vendors representing HOST, SOSA, CMOSS, and VITA standards-development organizations.

Aerospace Tech Week 2020 (to be held March 19-20, 2020 in Toulose, France) will now have the FACE Pavilion for exhibiting FACE solutions at the event.

“This is the first public FACE event in Europe and expands our capabilities into NATO countries and strengthens our relationships with our global coalition partners,” Downing says.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Full disclosure – Author John McHale is on the Advisory Committee for Aerospace Tech Week. www.mil-embedded.com

FACE Consortium Member List SPONSOR LEVEL US Air Force Life Cycle Management Center US Army PEO Aviation US Navy NAVAIR Boeing Collins Aerospace Lockheed Martin Raytheon PRINCIPAL LEVEL AdaCore AeroVironment, Inc. Bell DRS Training & Control Systems Elbit Systems of America GE Aviation Systems General Dynamics Green Hills Software Harris Corporation Honeywell Aerospace IBM Northrop Grumman Sierra Nevada Corp.

Sikorsky Aircraft Textron Systems US Army CCDC AvMC Wind River ASSOCIATE LEVEL Abaco Systems ADLINK Technology, Inc. Adventium Labs ANSYS Arizona State University AvalexTechnologies Avilution, LLC Brockwell Technologies Carnegie Mellon Univ. – Software Engineering Institute CERTON Software, Inc. CMC Electronics Cognoscenti Systems Core Avionics & Industrial Inc. CS Communication & Systems, Inc. CTSi Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions DDC-I DornerWorks www.mil-embedded.com

ENSCO Avionics Esterline AVISTA EuroAvionics USA LLC Garmin International, Inc. GECO Inc. IEE Infinite Dimensions Inter-Coastal Electronics, Inc. Johns Hopkins Univ. – APL Joint Tactical Networking Center Jovian Software Consulting LLC KIHOMAC L3 Technologies LDRA Technology Leidos Inc. Lynx Software Technologies Mercury Systems North Atlantic Industries, Inc. OAR Corporation Performance Software Physical Optics Corp.

Presagis USA, Inc. Pyrrhus Software Rapid Imaging Software RDRTec, Inc Real-Time Innovations (RTI) Riverside Research Rogerson Kratos SAIC Selex Galileo Inc. SimVentions Skayl LLC Star Lab Corporation SwRI StackFrame, LLC Terma North America TES-SAVI Thales USA, Inc. Trideum TTTech North America, Inc. Twin Oaks Computing University of Dayton Research Institute Vector Software, Inc. Verocel WolfSSL Zodiac Data Systems MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

October 2019 35

FACE & SOSA Update

FACE conformance becoming a necessity

By John McHale, Editorial Director

The U.S Air Force hosted the FACE & SOSA Expo and Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) event in Dayton, Ohio during September 2019 to see the progress being made in both the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) and the Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) consortia, which are managed by The Open Group. The roundtable below consists of members of the FACE Consortium who exhibited at the TIM. The panelists discuss the growth of the FACE Registry of conformant products, made on the aerospace market, how FACE 3.0 supports running multi-threaded applications across multiple cores; and proving the extensibility of FACE to the connected battlefield.

This month’s panelists are Richard Jaenicke, Director, Marketing, Safety and Security-Critical Products, Green Hills Software; Raymond Petty, Vice President, Global Aerospace & Defense, Wind River; Chip Downing, Senior Market Development Director, Aerospace & Defense, RTI; and Roy Keeler, Senior Product and Business Development Manager, Aerospace & Defense, ADLINK Technology.

CHIP DOWNING RTI Senior Market Development Director, Aerospace & Defense

RICHARD JAENICKE Green Hills Software Director, Marketing, Safety and Security-Critical Products

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS: The FACE/SOSA Expo and TIM was held in September in Dayton, Ohio, near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. What trends supporting the FACE initiative did you see emerging at the event?

JAENICKE: I see two trends. First, the momentum for FACE and SOSA technical standards is accelerating. Second, I see the avionics community embracing multiprocessing solutions for safetycritical systems. The FACE Technical Standard edition 3.0 requires that operating systems support running multithreaded applications across multiple cores. Running on multiple cores provides the flexibility needed to realize the performance and SWaP [size, weight, and power] benefits of avionics applications on multicore processors. Avionics

36 October 2019

ROY KEELER ADLINK Technology

RAYMOND PETTY Wind River

Senior Product and Business Development Manager, Aerospace & Defense

Vice President, Global Aerospace & Defense

integrators still need to be careful in the selection of a FACE-conformant operating system, though, because simple support of multithreaded applications does not mean it is supported for a high design assurance level (DAL), such as DAL A, B, or C. PETTY: Reinforcement that FACE solutions are becoming a reality and conformance is becoming a necessity was heard loud and clear. This is especially the case for the Army and Navy, whereas the Air Force seems less “all-in” and still utilizing OMS [Open Mission Systems]. Compared to last year’s event in Huntsville, this year seemed like a dramatic leap in terms of the amount of demonstrations and real-world solutions – confirming that FACE/SOSA were no longer just an academic exercise. From an operating system perspective, the changes in the FACE Standard from v2.1.1 and v3.0 by way of pointing to ARINC 653 standard updates, requires more in terms of multicore design, which results in an advantage for solutions that have received FACE v3.0 conformance.

DOWNING: A significant trend I saw [regarding FACE] emerging at this year’s event was the expansion of the FACE conformant products library. ADLINK, Collins Aerospace, DDC-I, Dornerworks, Green Hills, Harris, Honeywell, Raytheon, Real-Time Innovations (RTI), Skayl, Textron, and Wind River now have FACE-certified conformant products in the FACE Registry. It was quite gratifying to walk around the FACE and SOSA Expo and TIM and see the large number of FACE products ready for deployment.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

www.mil-embedded.com

KEELER: I see increased interest from companies outside the traditional VME/VPX supply chain who are investigating how FACE/SOSA can be applied to different form factors and how these products might fit into the FACE/SOSA ecosystem.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS: Why is FACE so important to the military end user, the prime contractors, and the embedded hardware and software providers?

JAENICKE: The value to the military end user is new capabilities fielded much faster because of the modularity, portability, and reuse enabled by the FACE Technical Standard. Prime contractors benefit as well from the modularity and reuse because a single component can now be used on multiple platforms instead of needing a new design for each platform. The modularity enables rapid insertion, speeding the time to production and time to money. Embedded hardware and software suppliers benefit from the more explicit definition of what programs want when they specify the FACE Technical Standard as well as the broadening market for COTS [commercial off-the-shelf) solutions when programs require adherence to modular open standards approaches in general.

PETTY: It is important to the military because it promotes development of software components that are portable across systems, which helps them avoid vendor lock-in; and the military is messaging compliance to open standards if you want to do future business with them. It does therefore promote healthy “co-opetition” where competitors are cooperating in providing inputs into the standards, sharing lessons learned, and working with each other on reference implementations. The existence of FACE also incentivizes participation because the nature of the beast is that if you don’t have a seat at the table, your competitors are going to make sure their products meet the standards without regard for whether or not your products do.

DOWNING: The FACE Technical Standard and business approach simply make military end users, prime contractors, and embedded hardware and software providers more efficient.

Military end users can now rapidly search, procure, and install proven COTS products into their next-generation systems faster than legacy systems, and with far lower cost and risk. Systems integrators can now create very advanced and competitive systems with compressed time frames and a proven supply chain with proven product interfaces. Embedded hardware and software providers can now crisply invest in technologies that have a well-defined marketplace and standardized capabilities KEELER: Ever since Secretary of Defense William Perry issued the 1994 directive – to use COTS products wherever and whenever possible – the government and industry have strived to arrive at a true open architecture framework for military systems. FACE and SOSA will take the industry a long way towards the objective of creating an ecosystem of interoperable hardware and software subsystems that should help reduce system life cycle costs provide greater cooperation between technology vendors and the U.S. defense community.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS: Twenty FACE-certified conformant products supplied by twelve suppliers are now in the FACE Registry, and FACE requirements are now in new military avionics contracts. What is the next design challenge/ hurdle for FACE members to overcome?

JAENICKE: The biggest challenge confronting the FACE Consortium is working with other Modular Open System Approaches (MOSA) such as OMS and VICTORY. Progress is being made. The first joint session between the FACE operating system segment team and the SOSA software working group occurred at face-to-face consortia meetings that directly followed [this event]. That collaboration is expected to continue on a regular basis. An example of a standards collaboration that is almost complete is between the FACE Consortium and the Software Communications Architecture (SCA), www.mil-embedded.com

where both standards are adapting to accommodate the other. Support for a few additional APIs critical to the SCA community was added to the FACE POSIX profiles, and the changes to the FACE Technical Standard are expected in edition 3.1. Likewise, SCA will recommend avoiding certain APIs to improve alignment further. That each organization was willing to make changes to accommodate the other bodes well for the future of standards collaboration.

PETTY: One primary challenge is proving the extensibility to the increasingly connected battlefield. The “A” in FACE is for “Airborne,” but FACE might soon extend into other domains like ground stations, unmanned vehicles, and any number of other things. The FACE Consortium would also like to expand into Europe and has started ensuring no export-controlled discussions take place at meetings; however, it has now been close to a year since there has been a request to the USG to change policies, and there has been no indication that a response will be forthcoming.

DOWNING: Well, first we need to continue to expand the number of FACEcertified conformant products in the FACE Registry. To prove the viability of the FACE Technical Standard and business approach, we need to get the number of certified conformant products to well over a couple of hundred registry entries. I am confident that the FACE supplier ecosystem will get to the 200+ number in the FACE Registry, but it will take bit more time – this is a well-structured, methodical process that simply takes time to achieve. The next big thing in FACE (and SOSA) will be airworthiness and security certification.

These capabilities are referenced in the FACE Technical Standard but are not hard FACE system requirements.

KEELER: One of the next challenges is how to expand FACE and SOSA beyond the domestic U.S. market. There is increased interest from the EU and NATO member countries in applying the benefits of the standards to domestic programs. How do we protect the security interests of the U.S. defense industry while enabling our foreign partners to participate in the consortium? MES

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October 2019 37

FACE & SOSA Update

FACE approach improves affordability, time-to-field of avionics systems and software platforms

By Ricardo Camacho One example of a software-driven platform that has moved toward open architecture through conformance to FACE requirements is that of the Apache helicopter. (Stock photo.)

Maintaining U.S. supremacy in all aspects of warfare can be challenging for leaders at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), partly due to being locked into proprietary platforms or vendor-specific open architectures. These issues limit the governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to bring in third parties to compete or add new capabilities, which has resulted in sole-source or single-bidder contract awards. An open systems architecture strategy has shown that it can curb the high-cost, long program schedules and lack of integration options of warfighting capabilities. This is where an initiative such as the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) can play a major role in making a business and technological difference.

Business and technology benefits of adopting the FACE approach The main goal of the FACE Consortium is to increase the affordability and improve time-to-field of avionics systems and their software-based platforms, which offers numerous technical and financial benefits. Technically, the FACE technical standard opens the floodgates to increased innovation across the defense industrial base by letting science and technology communities focus on groundbreaking capabilities or FACE units of conformance (UoCs) as opposed to the redesign of an entire avionics system in order to integrate new abilities.

Sequentially, deployment of the FACE technical architecture avionics systems that are required to complete a mission can now be tailored by adding new UoC capabilities to support a range of everevolving missions. Consequently, with

38 October 2019

the use of the FACE technical architecture, products facing obsolescence and/or endof-life are dramatically fewer, providing a tremendous business benefit for the U.S. armed services.

Since the FACE technical architecture enables the quick and cost-effective deployment of new capabilities, these UoCs eliminate redundant development efforts and break the vendor-lock situation that challenges the U.S. military. The benefits expand further by defaulting into having a common training for installation, operation, and maintenance of these systems.

The FACE approach also bolsters effective competition, lowering costs across DoD avionics systems. However, if you are the software supplier of a UoC chosen to fulfill a government contract, the financial and business gains can be enormous and continuous because of ever-evolving warfare demands. Cost benefits to software suppliers of UoCs have trickled down into the development life cycle, particularly in software development efforts, by reducing time-to-market of UoCs and contributing to the reduction in time-to-field of avionics systems.

Challenges for software developers Adopting a new standard is not a simple task. The entire development team needs to become familiar with all the requirements that the software unit needs to conform to and then provide the proof that shows adherence. These efforts raise a raft of important questions: What are the requirements that need to be satisfied? How should the

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

www.mil-embedded.com

proof be presented? What formats are acceptable? What are all the artifacts that need to be produced? Has a requirement been missed? Does the code adhere to the FACE coding rules? Is there a way to assure a passing grade before submitting the software unit to the FACE Verification Authority (VA)?

The FACE Consortium offers a helpful document called the Conformance Verification Matrix (CVM) which is a spreadsheet containing all requirements for all of the FACE software segments, but it does not answer all the necessary questions, leaving a lot of room for doubt. The manual use of spreadsheets is also inefficient, error-prone, and difficult to collaborate within a team environment. Automation is the path forward.

The need for automated software testing and FACE conformance Development of UoCs and adoption of the FACE approach is being abridged through automated software testing and FACE conformance-assurance offerings from tool vendors such as LDRA. One example is the automation of finding FACE code rule violations. As developers implement the code, violations are flagged, removing uncertainty in the use of unacceptable application programming interfaces (APIs) or the introduction of defects and security vulnerabilities. These automations improve time-to-market by lessening demands on developers and reducing exhaustive teamdevelopment efforts.

FACE conformance-assurance labor can also be automated and simplified by laying out the set of requirements and objectives that must be fulfilled in order for the software supplier to conform to a particular FACE software segment. Placeholders for expected artifacts not only guide the user, but also further the comprehension and adoption of the FACE Technical Standard. Template sample documents that must be delivered to the verification authority as artifacts expedite workflow and help developers avoid reinventing the wheel.

The final recommended step by the FACE technical standard is to execute the software unit against the FACE Conformance Test Suite (CTS). The ability to invoke the CTS from within a tool suite environment and then abstract the test results ensures that all test artifacts are captured and builds confidence in early adherence and certainty of a FACE-conformant unit of portability, before submitting to the verification authority. (Figure 1.)

FACE acceptance continues to grow A FACE Technology Interchange Meeting (TIM) is held annually to showcase the development of applications certified and or aligned to the FACE Technical Standard running on avionics systems. The 2019 TIM was held during September in Dayton, Ohio, sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. Attendees saw a number of demonstrations

of FACE-certified products by software suppliers.

The FACE Consortium’s goals and scope continue to broaden as well, with efforts to expand the FACE technical architecture and its capabilities into NATO countries and strengthen relationships with U.S. global coalition partners.

Adoption of the FACE approach across allied nations could benefit existing businesses locally and abroad in software supplier partnerships and in future technology-transfer agreements by allowing the sharing of innovative technologies between nations more affordably and effectively. The first public FACE event in Europe will take place in Toulouse, France at the Aerospace Tech Week conference in March 2020.

The FACE Consortium continues to evolve a framework for making military computing operations more robust, interoperable, portable, and secure. One example of this is the software-driven platform of the Army’s Apache helicopter: It has moved toward an open system architecture through FACE conformance requirements in order to enable software reuse throughout the defense enterprise.

Additionally, since the U.K. Ministry of Defense (MoD) has purchased more than 20 Apache attack helicopters, it gives the MoD the ability to upgrade or acquire additional capabilities by way of FACE UoCs. Furthermore, as FACE adoption continues to progress, software-testing tools such as LDRA’s tool suite are becoming a clear necessity in enabling this growth. The automation, workflow, and FACE alignment assurance it provides is becoming significant to the software suppliers looking to achieve FACE conformance.

For more information on the FACE Consortium, visit http://www.opengroup.org/ face. MES Ricardo Camacho is technical product marketing manager for LDRA.

›

Figure 1 | Pictured is a screen shot of LDRA software enforcing, tracking, and assuring conformance to the FACE technical standard.

www.mil-embedded.com

LDRA www.ldra.com

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

October 2019 39

FACE & SOSA Update

SOSA initiative gaining momentum in defense electronics community

By John McHale, Editorial Director

The U.S Air Force hosted the FACE & SOSA Expo and Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) event in Dayton, Ohio during September

MARK GROVAK

Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions Director, Avionics Business Development

2019 to see the progress being made in both the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) and the Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) consortia, which are managed by The Open Group. Our roundtable consists of members of the SOSA consortium who exhibited at the TIM. The

MARK LITTLEFIELD

Kontron

Vertical Product Manager for Defense

panelists discuss the effects SOSA is having on the military end user; how integrators, primes, and the Department of Defense (DoD) are embracing open architectures;

PAUL MESIBOV

Pentek

Vice President of Engineering

and how to ensure that such added structure does not stifle future innovation.

The panelists are Paul Mesibov, Vice President of Engineering, Pentek; Greg Powers, Global Market

MICHAEL MUNROE

Elma Electronic Principal Backplane Architect

Leader, Aerospace & Defense Performance Solutions Division, W.L. Gore; Mark Grovak, Director, Avionics Business Development, Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions; Michael Munroe, Principal Backplane Architect, Elma

GREG POWERS

W.L. Gore

Global Market Leader, Aerospace & Defense Performance Solutions Division

Electronic; and Mark Littlefield, Vertical Product Manager for Defense, Kontron.

40 October 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

www.mil-embedded.com

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS: The FACE/SOSA Expo and TIM was held in September in Dayton, Ohio, near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. What trends supporting the SOSA initiative did you see emerging at the event?

the depth of the questions we got told us that people are serious about embracing these standards quickly. Regarding trends, it’s clear that people want hardware to work with now and are looking for performance. There were lots of questions about 40-Gigabit Ethernet and 100-Gigabit Ethernet roadmaps. There were also a lot of folks looking for [single-board computers], switches, receivers, FPGA computing, and storage solutions. [All this] tells me that people want to build real systems right now.

MESIBOV: As both a SOSA working group participant and an exhibitor at the TIM, we have seen the interest in SOSA really take off within the community of our customers. Many questions were asked about the readiness of the emerging [technical] standard and how it will impact the embedded systems market. If any trend can be identified at this point it is that the message to learn about and ultimately include SOSA as part of our customers’ solutions is coming from high up in their organizations.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS: Why is SOSA so important to the military end user, the prime contractors, and the embedded hardware and software providers?

POWERS: There are multiple SOSA trends materializing now, including a growing list of participants that represent the ecosystem, the emergence of products and systems developed in alignment with the SOSA Technical Standard, the spooling up of the SOSA Outreach Committee and coherent messaging to industry, and the inclusion of anticipated SOSA conformance into contract language. Each of these trends points to the building momentum of the standard, its maturity, and the ecosystem rising as intended.

GROVAK: It’s evident that SOSA is gaining acceptance by suppliers who see the success of FACE and want to get in early. Companies are looking for early definition of SOSA requirements so that they can incorporate them into their product roadmaps.

MUNROE: There were several chassis and boards from multiple vendors aligned to SOSA standard to demonstrate interoperability. Elma’s platform included boards from C-W, Spectranetix, and IC. 25GBase-KR capability was implemented in two backplanes at the event, but it was not clear which slot and module profiles are already supporting this protocol.

Expansion plane switching appears to be an important new architectural feature.

LITTLEFIELD: First off, I was really surprised by the attendance. Just the sheer number of people interested in FACE and SOSA was a pleasant surprise, and www.mil-embedded.com

MESIBOV: The primary goals of the military end user are to be able to procure tactical systems that are cost-effective to buy, can be delivered quickly, and can be efficiently upgraded or repurposed. The technical challenge in meeting these goals for the prime contractors and their supplier community is to make the methods and techniques used to build these systems more systematic without reducing technical capability.

POWERS: This is really the essence of the SOSA initiative and underscores the merits of the open architecture concept. The end users will experience a broadened supply base, increased alternatives of compliant systems and components, and improved platform and system speed to market as producers have firm configuration understanding for their products. Also to come will be accelerated capability evolution as participants bring new ideas and technology to the ecosystem. Reduced development costs and gestation times should drive the DoD’s ability to fund more and more varied programs for an enhanced “warfighter toolbox.” Primes will see reduced platform time to market, resulting in faster revenue generation by having a menu of existing qualified solution sets that can be rapidly integrated. Hardware and software providers will have firm technical targets for their products and a waiting marketplace for new and MRO [maintenance, repair, and overhaul] products, providing confidence for portfolio investment and evolution.

GROVAK: SOSA provides a coordinated approach that takes advantage of a number of industry standards for quicker delivery of the latest technologies to the warfighter.

By consolidating these standards, SOSA should make it easier for system integrators to have numerous suppliers compete, in order to provide the warfighters with enhanced capabilities in a shorter amount of time.

MUNROE: The SOSA extensions to OpenVPX add a new level of interoperability together with critical new features such as radial clocks, RF, and optical backplane feed-thru capability as well as 25GBase-KR/100GBase-KR4 signaling capability and a push to support chassis and system management.

LITTLEFIELD: It’s really good that you differentiate between these four groups because SOSA is important to each for different reasons. For the military end user there are simply two things of key importance – getting new systems fielded more quickly and enabling faster, more affordable upgrades of fielded systems. Both of these are aimed at giving the warfighter the best, most advanced tools to accomplish their mission.

For the prime contractors/integrators, SOSA holds the promise of an ever-growing stable of components from numerous vendors which have a reasonable expectation to work together out of the box. Not having to design vendor-specific slots means that one can more easily do a technology refresh without the burden of vendor lock. This will be even more true once the SOSA conformance process is in place and vendors begin to certify their products.

Now, at first glance SOSA might seem a bad idea for the vendor community as it appears to drive commoditization. While that is true to an extent, it will more importantly drive hardware providers to innovate in other ways in order to differentiate from their competitors. For software providers the value is simple – it creates a market where today there effectively is none. It will pick up from FACE, VICTORY, MORA/VITA 49

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October 2019 41

FACE & SOSA Update VITA Radio Transport, and other open systems projects like COARPS and MAPS to bring a software component market to the high-performance sensor environment.

lock – may also inadvertently restrict innovation by being so prescriptive.

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS: What are the biggest hurdles for SOSA volunteers/participants to overcome in the next year?

An unintended consequence of SOSA’s drive to standardization may very well be the impediment and restriction of innovation. That’s because any new leapforward approach to integrating a system would not be allowed in a procurement process where SOSA conformance is required. That would put a company with an innovative approach between a rock and a hard place, because going to the SOSA Consortium in advance of a procurement to try and get that approach incorporated into the SOSA [Technical] Standard, would necessarily expose the innovation to competitors.

On the other hand, not doing so would preclude that company from proposing their non-SOSA-conformant solution, even if it would be a more innovative and better solution for the warfighter.

MESIBOV: For the SOSA participants who are developing the technical standard, the biggest challenge over the next year will be to define what conformance to the standard means and how it will be verified at the product level. After that, as systems are built to the standard, it will be exciting to see it evolve as problems are found and fixed and revisions to the standard are published.

POWERS: The SOSA standard is well underway, but is still a work in progress, so there is some risk of specification drift when looking at first-generation products and systems.

However, as with any new initiative, there will be a controlled ramp to market with continual learning and refinement. Concurrent with the drafting and adoption of the SOSA [Technical] Standard, steps in the path to market include concepting, prototypes, demonstrations, low-rate production, and a ramp to higher volumes as driven by proliferating DoD contract inclusion. A fundamental initiative accelerator that can’t be overstated is that SOSA is incorporating many existing standards, such as OpenVPX, Ethernet, and rugged connectivity via MIL connector specs, SAE AS6070, and ARINC 802. The integration of these proven open architecture building blocks benefits everyone in the ecosystem and further justifies participation in the tiers of standards.

GROVAK: A concern I have is that by defining hardware modules down to the individual pins, with no allowance for variation and also defining how the modules connect to each other, SOSA – while gaining some advantages from standardization and avoiding vendor

THE

The McHale Report, by mil-embedded.com Editorial Director John McHale, covers technology and procurement trends in the defense electronics community.

ARCHIVED MCHALE REPORTS AVAILABLE AT: WWW.MIL-EMBEDDED.COM/MCHALE-REPORT

42 October 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

MUNROE: A hurdle will be settling approaches and requirements for inband (control plane) system management and the validation methods for all requirements and recommendations.

Extending VITA 68 for 25GBase-KR signaling will likely be contentious.

LITTLEFIELD: So far, the SOSA community has been pretty successful at defining a constrained list of slot and module profiles along with implementation rules around them, and we’re seeing the first products designed against them hitting the streets. The big challenges for the next year will be twofold.

First, we are attacking some of the more difficult topics like system management and standardized interaction and security policies for things like sanitization and non-volatile read-only memory (NVRAM) functionality. These things can be surprisingly complex and varied in their implementation.

Second, we are defining the exact conformance language for the various rules captured in the standard. We need to craft a conformance mechanism that is robust enough to ensure that the goals of SOSA are being met, while keeping it from being overly expensive or an undue burden to the suppliers and integrators undergoing the certification process.

MES www.mil-embedded.com

SOSA Consortium Member List SPONSOR LEVEL

PRINCIPAL LEVEL

Air Force Life Cycle Management Center

BAE Systems, Inc.

Collins Aerospace

GE Aviation Systems

Lockheed Martin

General Dynamics

NAVAIR

Harris Corporation

Raytheon

Northrop Grumman

U.S. Army CCDC C5ISR

Sierra Nevada Corporation

U.S. Army PEO Aviation

UTC Aerospace Systems

U.S. Army Project Manager Electronic Warfare and Cyber ASSOCIATE LEVEL Abaco Systems

Meritec

Acromag, Inc.

Milpower Source

Annapolis Micro Systems, Inc.

North Atlantic Industries, Inc.

Behlman Electronics, Inc.

OAR Corporation

Bliley Technologies

Orion Technologies, LLC

CACI International, Inc.

Pentek, Inc.

Concurrent Technologies

Rantec Power Systems, Inc.

Crossfield Technology

Real-Time Innovations

Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions

Reflex Photonics Corp.

Delta Information Systems

Riverside Research

DRS Signal Solutions

Samtec

DRTI

Selex Galileo Inc.

Elma Electronic

SimVentions

FEI-Elcom Tech, Inc.

Skayl LLC

Georgia Tech Research Institute

Southwest Research Institute

W. L. GORE

Spectranetix, Inc.

Herrick Technology Laboratories, Inc.

SRC, Inc.

iRF Solutions

SR Technologies, Inc.

Joint Tactical Networking Center

Star Lab Corp

KEYW Corporation

SV Microwave

Kontron America

TE Connectivity

L3 Technologies

Telephonics

LCR Embedded Systems, Inc.

Tucson Embedded Systems

Lead Dog Technologies, LLC

University of Dayton Research Institute

Leidos

VITA

LGS Innovations

VTS, Inc.

Mercury Systems www.mil-embedded.com

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October 2019 43

Editor’s Choice Products Audio capture added to data recorder for training and incident analysis The new audio interface for Cambridge Pixel’s data recorder – aimed at use by control centers monitoring maritime vessels or air traffic – supports industry-standard audio capture and replay devices. The new capability is intended to enable detailed review and visualization of critical events, as all data is recorded in a time-synchronized database: For example, a significant event in the audio can easily be related to events in the radar or camera video, to cross-check what has happened. Using the newly added real-time data recorder (RDR), audio can be received from a DirectShow device or as network RTP data containing PCM or MP3 payloads, while audio data may be replayed back onto the network or through the host PC’s speaker/line out.

The RDR data recorder – fully configurable to record many data channels – is capable of recording and replying a range of data types, including radar video and associated tracks, audio, camera video (including ONVIF cameras), computer screens, and network data, as well as AIS, ADS-B, IFF, and NMEA-0183 navigation data from ships and aircraft. It is available as either a software application or a fully configured recording subsystem in a 19-inch rackmount unit, can be used as a background server application or for continuous 24/7 recording, or may be used with a user interface for selective recording and replay of events of interest.

Cambridge Pixel | www.cambridgepixel.com

Real-time video sensor networking can aid in design of standards-compliant vetronics Intended for use as a battlefield identification and decision-support tool, the RuggedCONNECT Smart Video Switcher from Pleora Technologies is an integrated standalone device that acquires, processes, and displays real-time video sensor data for vehicle-based local situational awareness (LSA) and driver vision enhancer (DVE) applications. The RuggedCONNECT Smart Video Switcher includes eight analog composite inputs that support RS-170/NTSC/PAL and two independent DVI-D single link displays. Support for GigE Vision and Def Stan 00-082 streaming protocols on dual 1 Gbps Ethernet channels enable the user to implement networked, open-standard, interoperable videomanagement systems as laid out in the GVA, NGVA, and VICTORY standards.

The switcher leverages the GPU resources of the NVIDIA Jetson TX2i, which enables add-ons like application-specific image processing and graphics overlay decision-support capabilities to reduce cognitive burden on service personnel and increase mission effectiveness. The TX2i supports applications such as image fusion, 360-degree stitching, map/terrain overlay, image enhancement, and even the more demanding convolutional neural network-based threat detection and classification.

Plug-in AI solutions for tank identification and driver awareness are also available for the RuggedCONNECT. Pleora Technologies | www.pleora.com

Chassis platforms for high-CFM OpenVPX applications New RiCool chassis configurations for nine-and 16-slot OpenVPX backplanes from Pixus Technologies are available for high-CFM [cubic feet per minute] requirements. The front-to-rear cooled 9U tall enclosure pulls air from an intake area below the card cage and blows the heat 90 degrees out the rear; the dual-hot-swappable fans enable as much as 191 CFM each of cooling. In a full 16-slot OpenVPX system (at one-inch pitch), this translates to 125 watts per slot. Increasing the height of the chassis by 1U boosts cooling rates up to 250 watts per slot, or 4,000 watts.

The nine-slot backplane features a BKP6-CEN09-11.2.13 profile, in compliance with VITA 65. It is designed for PCIe Gen3 (8 Gbaud/s) speeds, with higher-speed options available upon request. Additionally, the 16-slot 6U backplanes are available in multiple routing configurations. The units are equipped with standard modular power supplies for VPX voltages, with pluggable VITA 62 or other AC or DC power-supply options also available.

Pixus Technologies | www.pixustech.com

44 October 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

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Editor’s Choice Products OpenVPX development platform aimed at emerging C4ISR applications Elma’s 3U OpenVPX Development Platform – a complete test and development environment aligned with the requirements of emerging hardware open standards found under HOST and SOSA – is intended for use in newly emerging C4ISR [command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] programs and applications. At the heart of the system is a 12-slot backplane featuring current slot profiles supported by SOSA- and HOST-aligned SBCs, switches, network timing, and other payload modules, including VITA 67 high-speed RF and optical I/O connectivity. Users can order the platform with a recommended set of OpenVPX modules for rapid advancement of application development activities or may choose from their own set of board options.

Deployed systems may have as few as two modules or as many as twelve; developers can work with Elma or other suppliers to identify optimal system configuration, board count and final chassis design.

Elma Electronic | www.elma.com

Graphics and video-capture XMC focuses on reducing SWaP The Abaco NVP2102 XMC graphics and video-capture board – aimed at use in the harsh and cramped conditions typical of battlefield platforms – leverages the NVIDIA Pascal P2000 GPU (768 cores and 4 GB of GDDR5 memory) to total 2.3 teraflops at peak performance with support for both CUDA and OpenCL. Typical applications for the NVP2102 may include situational awareness, signals intelligence, ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance], and radar; the Pascal GPU’s high degree of parallelism also makes it fit for use in such GPGPU applications as machine learning and autonomous operations.

The board can support VGA, four 3G-SDI inputs, capable of 1080p60; two 3G-SDI outputs, also capable of 1080p60; two DisplayPort 1.4 ports capable of 4K resolution at 60Hz. The part also enables support for H.265 (HEVC)/H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) encode/decode. The board meets the MIL-STD-810G standard: in its conduction-cooled form, it is specified to operate at temperatures of -40 °C to +85 °C, while its air-cooled variation is specified to operate at temperatures of -40 °C to +70 °C. The board also supports the Abaco AXIS ImageFlex toolkit, which is intended for use in high-performance image processing, visualization, and autonomous applications aimed at size, weight, and power (SWaP)-sensitive platforms.

Abaco | www.abaco.com

Instrumentation gateways designed toward HOST/SOSA specs Instrumentation gateways from Crossfield Technology – available in several variations – can be used in real-time sensor data acquisition and physics-based simulation to connect modular sensors and transducers to real-time signal processors using ultra-high-speed fiber optic links with data rates approaching 100 Gbps. Both gateways are designed toward Hardware Open System Technology (HOST) and Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) specifications. The 6U version supports quad 40G-KR4, SRIO, or PICe data plane, as well as 400 Gbps optical Ethernet and 128 Gbps PCIe on the electrical and optical expansion planes.

The 3U VPX instrumentation gateway supports 100G-KR4 data plane, plus 100G-SR4 optical Ethernet and up to eight lanes of PCIe Gen 4 on the expansion plane.

The 3U gateway’s Stratix 10 MX FPGAs support multiple teraflops (6.3 teraflops theoretical limit) of signal processing performance and up to 16 GB of high-bandwidth memory in a ruggedized form factor using advanced PWB technologies and implementing a FMC+ slot. Users can develop, optimize, deploy, and update ISR, SIGINT, ELINT, and SDR applications using such tools as MATLAB/Simulink and Intel’s DSP Builder and Quartus Prime Pro. The 6U VPX STRATIX 10 SX FPGA SOC gateway can support multiple teraflops (9.2 teraflops theoretical limit) of signal processing performance while simultaneously running standard operation systems on multicore embedded processors.

Crossfield Technology | www.crossfieldtech.com www.mil-embedded.com

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

October 2019 45

CONNECTING WITH MIL EMBEDDED

By Mil-Embedded.com Editorial Staff

www.mil-embedded.com

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

National Veterans Foundation 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 time we are highlighting the National Veterans Foundation (NVF), a 510(c)(3) foundation that has as its stated mission to serve the crisis-management and information-referral needs of all U.S. veterans and their families through managing and operating the country’s only toll-free, vet-to-vet helpline for veterans and their families; to operate public-awareness programs that shine a consistent spotlight on the needs of America’s veterans; and to run outreach programs that serve veterans and families in need with food, clothing, transportation, employment, and other essential resources.

One of the major programs run by the NVF is its Lifeline for Vets, a national phone service that helps veterans of all eras, their family members, and active-duty service members with various needs including medical treatment, PTSD counseling, VA benefits advocacy, food, shelter, employment, training, legal aid, and suicide intervention and prevention.

The Lifeline for Vets is led by NVF founder Floyd “Shad” Meshad, who was a medical service officer during the Vietnam War; upon his return, he helped to develop PTSD treatment for the VA’s Vet Center program. The NVF Lifeline for Vets’ unique vet-to-vet model, says the organization, is far more effective than other programs in helping veterans in crisis get the right counseling and get them back on the path to a successful reintegration back to civilian life.

For more information on National Veterans Foundation and the Lifeline for Vets, please visit www.nvf.org.

PODCAST

WHITE PAPER

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Why Smart Video Displays May Not Be the Cleverest Choice

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Video systems have been key to improving

(editorial director for Military Embedded Systems) as he

situational awareness on ground, air, and

interviews industry leaders about their projects, challenges,

sea platforms for quite a few years now. Cameras and other sensors

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mounted on the exterior of the platform give operators critical vis-

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longer have an obvious advantage over simple, standalone displays.

about how the market evolved from 270-pound satellites to

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of both smart and simple displays before choosing a solution.

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46 October 2019

MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

www.mil-embedded.com

WHERE TECHNOLOGY EXPERTS GATHER

MARKET TRENDS, TECHNOLOGY UPDATES, INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS Military Embedded Systems focuses on embedded electronics â&#x20AC;&#x201C; hardware and software â&#x20AC;&#x201C; for military applications through technical coverage of all parts of the design process. The website, Resource Guide, e-mags, newsletters, and print editions provide insight on embedded tools and strategies such as software, hardware, systems, technology insertion, obsolescence management, and many other military-specific technical subjects.

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

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