Aerospace & Defence

e2v has partnered with French electronic design specialists, Adeneo, to develop an innovative, powerful and pocket-sized avionics computer weighing less than 300g. The computer achieves its ultra-compact size by combining e2v’s processing expertise and Adeneo’s state-of-the-art design and manufacturing capabilities.

Through its technology transfer business, Ploughshare Innovations, the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) is making a significant contribution to the development of cutting edge aerospace technologies. Invariably these have multiple military and civil applications. Of particular significance are:

  Rambus have announced that its Cryptography Research Division and The Boeing Company have signed a license agreement for the inclusion of advanced Differential Power Analysis (DPA) countermeasures in Boeing products. 

NXP Semiconductors and Tönnjes and Kirpestein B.V. have, after 12 months of testing in various weather conditions, with over 100 assorted military vehicles and at different speeds, presented the results of the first field trial with IDePLATEs (license plates). The field trial confirmed the secure, robust, effective, and reliable use of RFID technology for vehicle identification. 

The JunoCam camera aboard NASA's Juno mission is operational and sending down data after the spacecraft's July 4 arrival at Jupiter. Juno's visible-light camera was turned on six days after Juno fired its main engine and placed itself into orbit around the largest planetary inhabitant of our solar system. The first high-resolution images of the gas giant Jupiter are still a few weeks away.

  Ahead of this years' Farnborough International Airshow, engineers and scientists at BAE Systems and the University of Glasgow outlined their thinking about military aircraft and how they might be designed and manufactured in the future.

A team of small, shoebox-sized satellites, flying in formation around the Earth, could estimate the planet’s reflected energy with twice the accuracy of traditional monolith satellites, according to an MIT-led study published online in Acta Astronautica. If done right, such satellite swarms could also be cheaper to build, launch and maintain.

Intersil has announced what it claims to be the industry’s first radiation tolerant 36V in-amp (instrumentation amplifier) featuring an integrated differential ADC driver. The high performance ISL70617SEH differential input, rail-to-rail output in-amp delivers the industry’s highest signal processing performance for low-level sensor telemetry data critical to communication satellites.

Offering low power and high performance, the new rugged 3U VPX-based C912 from Aitech Defense Systems, combines NXP’s latest generation T4 series of QorIQ SoC multi-core e6500 processors along with a range of on-board I/O features.

Texas Instruments has introduced the industry's first DDR memory linear regulator for space applications. The TPS7H3301-SP is the only DDR regulator immune to single-event effects up to 65 megaelectron volts per centimetre squared (MeV-cm2), powering space-satellite payloads including SBCs, solid-state recorders and other memory applications.