How to Design Flexibility into a Rugged Deployed System
Technological advances in data acquisition, data storage, surveillance and recognition continually open new possibilities and promise to revolutionize the art of defense. These rising aspirations and the critical need to gain advantage and save lives in the field have made it even more important for designers to ensure their systems reach full potential. Yet even the most seasoned engineer can be vexed by design challenges that put their new systems at risk.

VITA 68 standardizes the VPX Compliance Channel to allow a common backplane design to support multiple fabric protocols
As the industry moves to higher serial fabric baud rates on VPX, the risk of signal integrity interoperability issues becomes increasingly severe. In order to deliver on the VITA 65 OpenVPX™ promise of interoperability, signal integrity requirements need to be independently defined for both backplanes and plug-in modules. The VPX family of standards does not currently define any signal integrity requirements for fabric connections across backplanes. At the current rates of 3.125 Gbaud and below. Good industry design practices have minimized these problems, but this is not a tenable long term approach at higher rates.

Simultaneous Processing and Recording of High-speed Sensor Data
During development of high-speed sensor systems, a data recorder is often used in the lab to capture sensor data. The data is then played back repetitively to the DSP. This allows develoment engineers to fine tune the DSP algorithms. In deployed applications, the data needs to be sent to the DSP for processing in real-time. At the same time, the high-speed sensor data needs to be recorded and archived for subsequent analysis and evaluation. How can high-speed streaming data be simultaneously processed while also being recorded? A physical layer switch makes this possible.

The Physical Layer Switch as a Media Converter
It may sound like a cliche, but we live in a wired world. The newer, more topical wireless world tends to dominate the headlines, but there can be no denying our absolute reliance on the countless miles of copper and fiber-optic cable that form the communications backbone of every industrialized nation. This media network runs through and connects the buildings of university and business campuses, lies burried along railway lines connecting cities, and even spans the ocean floor, enabling voice and data communications between continents. Aside from this vast installed base, copper and fiber-optic media are used in more specific and sometimes dynamic applications within corporate or academic environments, and in remote field applications, both commercial and military. A device that seamlessly converts one media type to another - leveraging the respective strengths of each, whilce accommodating limitations - would be an ideal solution to help build an optimal network.

Using Mezzanine Card Assemblies: Power Dissipation & Airflow Evaluation
With the functionality of electronics expanding at a rapid pace, as it has over the past twenty to thirty years, various product implemenations have been market successes. Form factors such as VME, VME64, VME64x, CompactPCI, PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) and Industry Packs (IP) have all been standardized by organizations such as IEEE, VITA and PICMG. In recent years, we have seen rapid growth in product offerings using the Common Mezzanine Cards (CMC) and PCI Mezzanine Cards (PMC) form factor. A high percentage of new circuit card designs for VME64x and CompactPCI have provisions for supporting at least one mezzanine module.