Among the priorities for mod-ernizing key defense capabilities cited in the NDS that commercial off-the-shelf COTS vendors are well-positioned to support are: • New investments in cyber-
Trang 2# RED FIT
n SKEDD Direct Plug-in Technology
n IDC Connection
n Solderless Solution
n Simple to Plug & Unplug
n Min 10 Mating Cycles
n Reverse Polarity Protection
Perfect
match.
RED FIT IDC is a solderless reversible direct plug-in connector with SKEDD technology and
insulation displacement connection The SKEDD contacts are plugged directly into the plated
through-holes of a PCB
A complete part and a potential error source is eliminated This results directly in higher
process reliability, savings in space, material and process costs
www.we-online.com/REDFIT
PCIM Europe Hall 7 Booth 229
Trang 4O N L I N E M U S T - R E A D S
F E A T U R E S
8 COVER STORY Mil/Aero Electronics
Defense spending opens door to system technology innovations
4 Viewpoint: Fluffing the cloud
5 Publisher’s Perspective: Tribute to an American classic
6 Outlook (Technology News):
6 The key to smarter, faster AI likely found by modeling moth brains
6 Physicists to build laser so powerful it could rip apart fabric of space
27 Product Trends: Packaging, Cabinets & Enclosures
29 Product Roundup: Electromechanical Components
Google’s new quantum processor aims to
outper-form supercomputers http://bit.ly/2FuOS7U
Battery sensor allows for Li-ion batteries to be
charged five times faster http://bit.ly/2FuOAhs
10 tips on how to properly document a design so
others can follow http://bit.ly/2FpMJ18
EDITORIAL STAFF
Bolaji Ojo .Global Editor-in-Chief
Richard Quinnell .Editor-in-Chief,
richard.quinnell@aspencore.com • electronicproducts.com
Majeed Ahmad Kamran .Contributing Editor
Patrick Mannion .Contributing Editor
Alix Paultre .Contributing Editor
Lori O’Toole .Chief Copy Editor
Nicole DiGiose .Technical Content Manager
Max Teodorescu .Digital Content Manager
Pam Fuentes .Business Planning Analyst
Giulia Fini .Graphic Designer
Giulia Fini .Cover Design
Lauren Heller .Production Designer
Subscriber Service 1-866-813-3752 Subscriber Service Fax 1-847-564-9453 Reprints (Wright’s Media) 1-877-652-5295
Published by AspenCore
1225 Franklin Avenue, Suite 400 Garden City, New York 11530 TEL: 516-667-2300 • FAX: 516-667-2301
Victor Alejandro Gao
Chairman
Greg Rivera
Group Publisher Electronics Group
Electronic Products Magazine (USPS 539490) (ISSN 0013-4953)— Published monthly by AspenCore, 1225 Franklin Avenue, Suite 400, Garden City, NY 11530 Periodicals postage paid Garden City, NY and additional mailing offices Electronic Products is distributed at no charge to qualified persons actively engaged in the authorization, recommendation or specification of electronic components, instru- ments, materials, systems and subsystems The publisher reserves the right to reject any subscription on the basis of information submitted
in order to comply with audit regulations Paid subscriptions able: U.S subscriber rate $65 per year, 2 years $110 Single issue,
avail-$6.00 Information contained herein is subject to change without notice No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for its accuracy
or completeness.
Postmaster: Send address changes to Electronic Products,
PO Box 489, Skokie, IL 60076-0489 Phone: 847-559-7317
©2018 by AspenCore ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Publications Mail Agreement Number
40012807
Return Undeliverable Canadian Addresses to:
Station A PO Box 12, Windsor, ON N9A 6J5
26
Trang 5The right AC power SOLUTION at the right price
Behlman has an ultra-reliable AC power supply or frequency converter that can
be configured for your exact needs Our rugged rack-mounted and portable units
deliver AC power at a low cost per watt – making us the choice for military and industrial applications for over 60 years.
> Avionics & aircraft 400Hz
> Simulators & trainers
> Airborne, shipboard, ground and mobile
Trang 6The electronic design engineering
field is a fantastic place to be at
any given point and especially so
in these modern times The past two
decades saw the groundwork laid for
these exciting times in technologies like
organic LEDs, wide-bandgap ductors, and the digital infrastructure
semicon-These and other advanced core ogies enable and empower new solutions
technol-to serve existing application spaces and create and develop new ones
This synergistic development aspect
of electronic design was very ent these past weeks at the APEC and Embedded World shows as engineers from around the globe came together
appar-in San Antonio, Texas, and Nuremberg, Germany, to exchange ideas and look at the latest in embedded systems
The booths at both events were crammed with the latest solutions avail-able for applications both mature and speculative, and at each (some visitors, including me, bounced between both), there was a buzz of activity as company reps and visitors played with the demon-strations and bounced ideas off of one another The energy was palpable at each
of the venues, and the energy of all of those people dealing with one another in these public marketplaces was palpable
In this issue, we’ve pulled together some very cool examples of the latest technologies from both shows, and we hope this foments new ideas for new solutions with you One of the notable aspects of any new technology is that any given group of engineers will tell you sev-eral more applications than you thought
of when developing it, and the number and quality of these new technologies are providing the foundation of the remak-ing of society
The cloud and IoT are shaping society
in fundamental ways, and you are the ones shaping the devices in it and the infrastructures supporting it Every de-vice that you make is a voice in the great chorus of development moving society forward, and these exhibitions are the concert halls One positive aspect of Em-bedded World, for example, was the fact that most booths contained functional demonstrations of technology and not just displays of components and parts
In the area of wireless, one of the trends that we observed was the final filling in, or in the words of the headline, the “fluffing out” of the cloud There are a lot of wireless devices using wired
or sub-gigahertz proprietary wireless systems, for example, and bringing them into the IoT is the true “final mile” of the cloud Solutions shown ranged from multi-protocol wireless modules and
Fluffing the cloud
Continued on page 20
Trang 7NEW YORK — American readers
of this column are prone to
recognize the name E.B White,
a 20th-century author best known for
his children’s books such as “Stuart
Little” and “Charlotte’s Web.” A
resi-dent of this great American city, White
was also a prolific columnist for the
classic humor, literature, and
journal-ism magazine The New Yorker And in
a prose entitled “Unwritten” in April
1930, White observed in his signature
self-deprecating style that the work of
a writer always represented a choice —
the choice of what to write and what
not to Which brings me to the subject
of our column this month: Why does a
journalist write at all?
At ASPENCORE, our editorial
mis-sion is to bear witness and to
cele-brate human achievement as manifest
through advancement in technology
and engineering While every one
of our journalists makes their own
personal choice as to why and what
they write, as a publishing house, we
encourage an intention to affirm or, if
the writing starts out decrying an
inju-ry or injustice on behalf of our readers,
that by the end, it arrives at a
construc-tive juncture Sometimes, that takes
the form of questioning a dubious
claim in a manufacturer’s new product
introduction campaign Other times,
it could be the critique of a business
trend we believe is over-hyped, a
tech-nical achievement that is
under-recog-nized, or an important workplace issue
that would not have found its voice had
it not been for the help of these pages
Of course, a great deal of how this
mission is achieved is left intentionally
undirected and uncoordinated
be-tween the house and our writers As a gentle reader wrote in response to this column last month, today’s publishers face a pivotal task to transform the economics of publishing so the im-portant reporting can be done without fear of loss of funding, which we have seen happen to some of our fellow
publishing houses in the industry And yet as much as ASPENCORE as a com-mercial concern must make money,
we strive even harder to always make sense To achieve this duo of aims, at
ASPENCORE, we rather like the good old system at The New Yorker, as de-scribed by White in another column:
The writers write as they please, and the magazine publishes as it pleases
When the two pleasures coincide, something gets into print When they don’t, the reader draws a blank And you, the reader, are here to judge both the house and our writers on our re-spective merits This is what editorial independence means to us
While we are on the subject of editorial policy, we expect to share some exciting news soon about how
we will extend our remit this year to
introduce both more depth and more diversity to the topics covered in our titles We will give you a snippet of our redesign efforts, with a greater focus
on longer, less frequent, but more thought-provoking pieces that delve into an issue without the pressures of
a daily publishing cadence To find out more, please check back in this column next month
By the time these words go to print, many of our readers will be wheels-up
to a productive conference in Münich, Las Vegas, or Shanghai or will have just returned Here is to safe and pleasant journeys for all on the road As ever, if you have a comment or want to whis-per us a story tip, you can find me at
victor@aspencore.com, or contact your
favorite ASPENCORE writer directly From all of us at ASPENCORE, thank you for your support ☐
Tribute to an American classic
In this month’s perspective, our publisher, Victor Gao, pays tribute
to an American classic and delves into our proudly old-fashioned
journalistic values
BY W VICTOR GAO
Publisher and Managing Director
The ASPENCORE Group
At ASPENCORE, our editorial mission is to bear witness and to celebrate human achievement as manifested through advancement in technology and engineering and you, the reader, are here to judge both the house and our writers on our respective merits This is what editorial independence means to us.
Trang 8The key to smarter, faster AI likely
found by modeling moth brains
Researchers at
the
Univer-sity of
Wash-ington have
devel-oped a relatively simple
neural network that mimics
biological neural systems The
performance of the new neural-network
model points to the possibility of building
AIs that are less complex yet far more
effi-cient at learning because of it At the same
time, the research, published in the arXiv
repository, yielded new insight into how
living creatures learn — or at least how
some creatures learn some things
The most common path to emulate the
effectiveness of biological neural systems has
been to create increasingly complex artificial
intelligences with increasingly complicated
machine-learning capabilities Biological
systems that outperform AIs sometimes
aren’t all that complex, however, and living
creatures often learn far more quickly than
AIs using significantly fewer experiences to
learn than AIs require data sets
Starting with these observations, UW
researchers resolved to devise a relatively
simple neural-network model that mimics
the relatively uncomplicated structure of a
moth’s neurological system
The University of Washington has been
analyzing insect biology for decades; this
research team chose moths because UW
labs have already thoroughly mapped their
neurological systems They already knew
that moths can learn smells after
experi-encing them only a few times Despite the
relative simplicity, however, it remained
unclear precisely how moths’ neurological
systems worked when learning
Most neural networks operate on
the principle of backpropagation With
this technique, the weights between
neurons (essentially the strength of the
connection between them) are constantly
recalculated through a process of feeding
outputs back into the system so that
inputs and outputs can be compared and
adjusted against each other
Biological systems rarely do anything like this
Instead, they are commonly organized
as feed-forward cascades
The beginning of the cascade
in hawk moths is a set of about 30,000 chemical receptor neurons (RNs), which feed signals into an antennal lobe (AL) The
AL contains roughly 60 isolated clusters of cells (called glomeruli — it pays to enhance your word power!), each of which focuses
on a single odor stimuli feature The AL, the researchers say, is inherently noisy The researchers liken the AL to a pre-amplifier,
“providing gain control and sharpening of odor representations.”
Signals from the AL are forwarded to
a structure called the mushroom body (MB) The MB contains roughly 4,000 cells (Kenyon cells) associated with forming memories Signals go through two more ancillary structures (each numbering in the tens of cells), the function of which is believed to be to read out the signals from the MB These sparser structures act as noise filters, the researchers wrote Noise isn’t eliminated but is sufficiently reduced for the purpose of effective learning
The process does not work at all without octopamine, described as a neu-romodulator Release of the chemical is triggered by a reward — for example, the moth finding sugar to consume When a
moth finds a reward, the octopamine that
is released stimulates enhanced activity
in the AL and MB The practical effect of this enhanced activity is to strengthen the connections between correlated neurons
in the moth’s neurological system The mechanism is called Hebbian learning; the extent to which the strength of neuro-nal connections can be changed is called Hebbian plasticity
The UW researchers built a ical model that mimics all of this, and their neural models of moths learned quickly with minimal simulated odor inputs Their results are similar to the behavior that they observe in the moths, strongly suggesting that they have an accurate model
mathemat-If so, that will have ramifications both for biology and for neural networks
That the behavior of the model was
so similar to that of actual biological systems encouraged the researchers to expect that they might now have a clearer understanding of the mechanisms at work
in living creatures The logical systems of moths are structurally similar to those of many other creatures, the researchers noted
olfactory/neuro-Their work also suggests a new path to explore for machine learning “Specifically,” they wrote in their paper, “our experiments elucidate mechanisms for fast learning from noisy data that rely on cascaded net-works, sparsity, and Hebbian plasticity.”
Brian Santo
Avacuum might not be empty at
all; it might only seem empty on
balance That balance would be
between electrons and their anti-matter counterparts, positrons According to theory, any vacuum is filled with such electron-positron pairs These pairs
would be undetectable because they wouldn’t interact with anything — with the possible exception of the beam from
a 100-petawatt laser Which is one of the reasons why Chinese researchers are about to begin building a 100-PW laser.These researchers propose to pulse
Physicists to build laser so powerful
it could rip apart fabric of space
Trang 9an incredibly powerful beam for a few trillionths of a second
through a vacuum with the expectation that it will induce
elec-tron-positron pairs to break apart Positrons are ephemeral, but
the electrons would remain It would look like producing
some-thing out of nosome-thing The proposed process is being described
as “breaking the vacuum.”
The formula E=MC2 suggested two things One is that mass
can be turned into extraordinary amounts of energy Scientists
followed that lead in a number of directions, including the
devel-opment of the atomic energy The formula also suggests that it’s
possible to translate energy into mass, though doing so is
consid-ered significantly harder Breaking the vacuum would be a rare
instance of it
The Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics in
China currently holds the record for the most powerful laser In
2016, the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF)
achieved a burst of 5.3 PW The institute is currently preparing
to nearly double its record by using SULF to emit a 10-PW
pulse by the end of this year
It is also planning to build a 100-PW laser called the Station
of Extreme Light (SEL), which could come online as early as
2023 Photon energy from the device could reach 15 keV
European researchers were thinking about building a
200-PW laser but have held off even planning such a beast until
they turn on a 1-PW laser in Prague this year and then build
two more facilities that would take intermediate steps toward
100 PW or more, reported Science
Russia is building the infrastructure to support a proposed
180-PW laser called the Exawatt Center for Extreme Light
Studies (XCELS) Japanese researchers, who held the record
with a 2-PW pulse before the Chinese eclipsed them, have
proposals for a 30-PW device, according to Science
Breaking the vacuum would be spectacular, but
high-en-ergy lasers could be useful in other applications as well They
have been used for particle acceleration, inertial confinement
fusion, radiation therapy, and for secondary-source generation
of X-rays, electrons, protons, neutrons, and ions, according to
physicists at Cambridge University A paper that they wrote in
2015 explains the different types of high-energy lasers China’s
SEL would be an OPCPA laser
Brian Santo
OUTLOOK 7
ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS • electronicproducts.com • APRIL 2018
Trang 10The U.S Department of Defense’s
(DoD’s) 2018 National Defense
Strategy (NDS) said it clearly: “Our
backlog of deferred readiness,
procure-ment, and modernization requirements
has grown in the last decade and a half
and can no longer be ignored We will
make targeted, disciplined increases in
personnel and platforms to meet key
capability and capacity needs.” With that
in mind, Congress increased the FY 2018
defense budget to $700 billion — an
increase of $108 billion
This article will lay out some of the
areas where that budget will be spent and
what areas may present opportunities
for designers to innovate to close current
and future technology gaps
AI, big data, and robotics critical
but need to be affordable
The technological priorities called out in
the NDS will drive a significant increase
in R&D spending to close technology
gaps in advanced computing, artificial
intelligence (AI), and autonomy and
robotics Among the priorities for
mod-ernizing key defense capabilities cited in
the NDS that commercial off-the-shelf
(COTS) vendors are well-positioned to
support are:
• New investments in cyber-defense and
the continued integration of
cyber-ca-pabilities into the full spectrum of
military operations
• Investments in C4ISR to develop
resil-ient, survivable, federated networks and
information ecosystems
• Advanced autonomous systems, AI,
and machine learning
For developers of military
embed-ded COTS electronics solutions, this
additional spending promises increased
support for technologies that address
resilience, lethality, and readiness
Designers of defense and aerospace systems and platforms desire to contin-uously introduce advanced technology that provides the warfighter with an indisputable advantage in the battlefield
These technologies range from sensors, computing, and networking to electro-mechanical systems
However, advanced technology by itself isn’t enough It also needs to be affordable, reliable, and sustainable The warfighters’ lives depend on the tech-
nology, and history has proven that if a soldier can’t trust their technology, they will abandon it
New spending on advanced puting will result in improvements for leveraging big data analytics, enabling the warfighter immediate access to all of their critical information Such access will require the use of cloud-computing technologies to enable data access by any device, wherever the soldier is located,
com-at any time it’s desired More than thcom-at,
to bring the power of machine learning (ML) for AI to the network edge will require far greater local processing capa-bility in order to deliver real-time data and solve the cloud’s inherent latency and bandwidth limitations
Investments in AI and ML will provide capabilities that disrupt battle-field applications such as intelligence,
surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), and electronic warfare (EW) Support-ing these new capabilities will require advances in heterogeneous high-perfor-mance embedded computing (HPEC) technologies
Embedded systems for use on semi- and fully autonomous unmanned platforms, whether on the ground,
in the air, or at sea, will require the development of low-power, ultra-small form-factor (USFF) processing, networking, full-motion video, and data-storage solutions It’s estimated, for example, that a fully autonomous car will require 50 to 100 times the com-pute power needed to support today’s advanced driver-assistance systems.The overarching investment strategy described in the DNS is to bring these advanced technologies to the battlefield
in order to provide a force multiplier that gives warfighters a strategic and tacti-cal advantage over the adversary That said, it’s not enough to just deploy new technologies, it’s also necessary to ensure that those technologies are brought into the battlefield in a way that protects and secures them with the resiliency that they need to survive enemy attempts to dis-able or disrupt their intended operation
Ensuring operational effectiveness
in the field: GPS
The new technologies will provide new capabilities upon which the warfighter will surely become dependent As such, they must also feature the defenses needed to ensure that their network and computing environments are protected against adversaries and so remain opera-tionally effective
An example of an advanced nology upon which the warfighter has become dependent is GPS When intro-duced as part of the DoD’s Second Offset strategy in the mid-1970s, GPS provided
tech-a significtech-ant tech-advtech-anttech-age in the btech-attlefield thanks to its ability to deliver accurate
Defense spending opens door to system technology innovations
BY MIKE MACPHERSON
Vice President, Strategic Planning,
Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions
www.curtisswright.com
The new technologies will provide new capabilities upon which the warfighter will surely become dependent As such, they must also feature the defenses needed
to ensure that their network and computing environments are protected against adversaries and
so remain operationally effective.
Trang 12position, navigation,
and timing (PNT) data
This technology was essential for
applications such as precision-guided
weapons like the Tomahawk missile
Over the years, it’s become clear that our
dependence on GPS also makes it a
vul-nerability In environments in which GPS
is denied or disabled, all of the weapons
that depend on it are made ineffective To
counter that vulnerability and threat, an
assured PNT (A-PNT) solution must be
available that is able to operate even in a
GPS-denied environment New
cost-ef-fective and accurate COTS-based A-PNT
technologies will enable the deployment
of cost-effective, rugged solutions for
GPS-denied environments
Making AI and autonomous
vehicles resilient
The development of new technologies
based on AI will enable man-to-machine
teaming solutions that deliver a significant
advantage in the battlefield Leveraging
AI, autonomy, and robotics will result in
machines that can operate independently,
whether as an individual entity, paired
with other machines in applications (such
as a swarm configuration of drones), or in
a soldier-machine interface in which the
machine has its own autonomous
capabil-ity augmenting the warfighter
An example of the latter is an
auton-omous ground combat “mule” able to
relieve the warfighter’s personal burden
of carrying batteries, chargers,
ammuni-tion, etc By reducing the weight in the
warfighter’s backpack, these small
auton-omous vehicles will significantly increase
the soldier’s ability to fight
Likewise, the use of autonomous aerial
vehicles to deliver logistics equipment
or to locate IEDs will reduce the warfighter’s exposure to risk and improve their lethality On the other hand, as these new solutions become common, adver-saries will strive to find ways to attack and disable them For example, one strategy for countering a learning machine is to spoof it with false information, forcing it
to produce an incorrect answer
Improving resilience, another key goal of the DNS, will ensure that de-ployed systems have the ruggedness and reliability to survive harsh environments and the security to protect against enemy attempts to exploit their vulnerabilities
Autonomous vehicles, such as mine detectors, can keep the warfighter out of harm’s way, but that autonomy needs to
be trusted For this, the system requires the resilience, or self-resilience, that ensures that it’s reliable and can’t be easily disabled
A machine can be manual, tonomous, or fully autonomous In each
semi-au-of these states, the higher the level semi-au-of
autonomy, the more the machine needs self-resilience When a machine is fully manual, the warfighter provides the resil-ience In the case of a semi-autonomous system, resilience is shared between the operator and the machine In a fully autonomous system, resiliency depends completely on the expert systems built into that machine
Autonomous systems need resilience and security
To be able to confidently depend on fully autonomous systems will require invest-ments in technologies that provide both resilience and security
An example of resiliency is found
in safety-certifiable avionics systems for manned or unmanned military aircraft To operate safely over do-mestic airspace, these platforms are increasingly required to meet DO-254 hardware and DO-178 software certi-fication for specific Design Assurance Levels (DALs) recognized by aviation authorities around the world, such
as the FAA in the U.S., the Canadian Transport Board, and EASA in Europe and the U.K While safety certification
is handled at the platform level, the electronic modules used to build out avionics subsystems must be supported with comprehensive data artifacts His-torically, modules for safety-certifiable subsystems were costly custom designs that took years to design and millions
of dollars to develop
In recent years, a new class of fective DO-254-certifiable COTS boards has become available, greatly speeding
cost-ef-and lowering the cost
of
inte-Fig 1: The VPX3-1703 is an example of
an Arm-based 3U OpenVPX single-board
computer designed for DO-254 safety-certifiable avionics
applications.
Fig 2: Security
in the field is critical, so the DTS1 NAS supports cost-effective two-layer encryption.
Trang 13grating safety-certifiable applications
The preferred processor architecture for
these COTS modules has been the Power
Architecture family of devices being that
Intel processors only support DO-254 up
to the DAL C level
As NXP shifts its focus from
devel-opment of new Power Architecture
pro-cessors toward Arm-based propro-cessors,
designers of safety-certifiable systems
are increasingly turning to Arm-based
solutions Arm processors support
D0-254 up to the most stringent and
critical level, DAL A, and also provide
the additional benefit of very low power
dissipation The VPX3-1703 3U
Open-VPX is a good example of an Arm-based
single-board computer (SBC) (Fig 1) It
is designed for DO-254 safety-certifiable
avionics applications
The concepts of resilience and trusted
systems refer not only to safety but also
to data and hardware security Great
strides are being made today to enable
COTS systems with anti-tamper
technol-ogies, cybersecurity, and protection of
data-at-rest and data-in-motion
For example, the Data Transport System (DTS1) network attached storage (NAS) device supports cost-effective
two-layer encryption (Fig 2) The
DTS1 is also easily integrated into work-centric systems
net-Design for tech-savvy warfighters
The soldiers now using this equipment are digital natives — almost born with modern technologies in their hands
Along with this technological ness comes a high level of assumption and expectation
adept-Today’s warfighter expects and pends on access to technologies as good
de-as or better than what they have at home, such as an iPhone X, and social net-working services to enable information sharing in real time in the battlefield All
of today’s internet resources, whether searching on Google or asking questions
of Siri or Alexa, are only years away from being available to the warfighter As we increasingly bring reliable networked
desktop computing, mobile platform, and social media capabilities to the warfighter to enable “network-centric warfare,” the network itself has become a key component of our ability to operate.This technological adeptness can also be leveraged to address readiness,
an area of military spending that has been relatively underfunded in recent years Advanced computing can be brought to bear for training and mis-sion-planning and exploiting technolo-gies developed for the gaming industry
to provide sophisticated, realistic scenarios and experiences
By having training embedded in the actual deployed platform, warfighters will be able to train while they operate without requiring a dedicated training location Realistic simulation can be done virtually, providing, for example, the ability to train for a specific mis-sion while en route
Contain costs with open systems
Many of the technologies discussed
ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS • electronicproducts.com • APRIL 2018
Trang 14above will benefit from the use of open
systems, which reduce design risk and
greatly speed time to deployment The use
of open systems also delivers significant
cost reductions Affordability results from
competition and provides an alternative to
expensive proprietary solutions
Another key benefit of open systems
is seen in technology insertions Open
systems enable the rapid insertion of
new technology by defining an
inter-face between different entities whose
advancements progress at different
rates An open-systems interface, such
as the OpenVPX system architecture,
functions as a differential that enables
the use of technologies that evolve out
of synchrony
For example, the fire control
com-puter algorithms used in a main battle
tank to handle ballistic solutions tend to
evolve at a very slow relative rate with
very little change from one year to the
next In comparison, the underlying
processing technology used to run those
algorithms progresses much faster On
the flip side, with EW as the example,
the very sophisticated algorithms used to
help identify a specific signal of interest
in the noise of the electromagnetic
spec-trum have developed at a much faster
rate than the processors that are used to
run them in deployed systems
The result is that the most advanced
EW algorithms wait for processor
bandwidths to catch up in order for them to be put to use The use of open-standard interfaces enables the processing technology and the algo-rithms used on deployed platforms to advance at different rates
Innovation opens door to vulnerabilities
For every new opportunity and nological leap forward, there is likely
tech-to be an associated vulnerability that emerges While investing in the tech-nologies sought by the DoD in order
to enable new capabilities and increase force lethality, technology providers must also invest in mitigating against those vulnerabilities
The use of COTS-based open tems provides a cost-effective approach
sys-to bringing these capabilities sys-to the warfighter quickly and with the least risk To bring the powerful benefits
of advanced computing, AI, omy, and robotics to the warfighter, COTS solutions must be designed and packaged to meet the environ-mental and usage requirements of the battlefield The equipment must be dependable and operate while exposed
auton-to extreme environmental conditions
The technology must also be designed and packaged to ensure safe and secure operation Care must be taken to en-sure safe operation without requiring burdensome safety precautions System
designers need to design and package next-generation COTS solutions to eliminate vulnerabilities to adversarial access or attack, including cybersecu-rity and protection against reverse-en-gineering to prevent physical access intended to disrupt operation
It’s essential that these new ogies assure the security of the defense systems and critical information during development and operation
technol-Another area of great importance is testing, which must be done to ensure that deployed COTS solutions are reliable and deliver error-free operation throughout their useful life
Conclusion
The DoD and warfighters depend on trusted and proven sources of supply, and Congress has made available the funds to make this happen Now it’s up
to designers and other innovators to realize the full promise of new technol-ogies outlined here, just as examples For sure, the COTS approach provides
a proven alternative to costly, closed proprietary system architectures, speeds deployment, and ensures that critical technologies remain readily available over the lifecycle of their use How tech-nologists build upon and apply it for next-generation battlefield deployments with more tech-savvy warfighters will be interesting to watch ☐
• Dual inductors in a single shielded package saves board space
• Very low coupling coefficient (k<0.001) minimizes crosstalk
• Excellent inductance vs current linearity up to 10 Amps
• Economical solution for a wide range of audio applications
UA801x Series Dual Inductors
for Class-D Output Filters
Learn more @ coilcraft.com
Trang 15Designing an optical heart rate
monitoring (HRM) system, also
known as photoplethysmography
(PPG), is a complex and multidisciplinary
undertaking Design factors include
human ergonomics, signal processing and
filtering, optical and mechanical design,
low-noise signal receiving circuits, and
low-noise current pulse creation
Wearable manufacturers are
increas-ingly adding HRM capabilities to their
health and fitness products, which is
helping to drive down the cost of sensors
used in HRM applications Many HRM
sensors now combine discrete
compo-nents such as photodetectors and LEDs
into highly integrated modules These modules enable a simpler implementa-tion that reduces the cost and complexity
of adding HRM to wearable products
Wearable form factors are steadily changing as well While chest straps have
effectively served the health and fitness market for years, HRM is now migrating to wrist-based wearables Advances in optical sensing technology and high-performance, low-power processors have enabled the wrist-based form factor to be viable for
System integration considerations for heart rate sensing designs
When it comes to optical
Fig 1: Principles of operation for optical heart rate monitoring.
Fig 2: The basic electronics required to capture optical heart rate.
Excitation signal Typically green (525 nm ), 100 µs long pulses repeated at 25 Hz
Attenuated and pulse modulated light
Optical blocking is critical to prevent the unmodulated excitation signal from overwhelming the desired signal
Skin
Sensor PhotodiodeGreen LED
Subdermal Tissue
ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS • electronicproducts.com • APRIL 2018
FEATURE 13
Discrete Semiconductors
Trang 16many designs The HRM algorithms have
also reached a level of sophistication to be
acceptable in wrist form factors
Other new wearable sensing form
fac-tors and locations are emerging — such
as headbands, sport and fitness clothing,
and earbuds However, the majority of
wearable biometric sensing will be done
on the wrist
HRM design fundamentals
No two HRM applications are alike
System developers must consider many
design tradeoffs: end-user comfort,
sensing accuracy, system cost, power
consumption, sunlight rejection, how
to deal with many skin types, motion rejection, development time, and physical size These design considerations impact system integration choices: whether to use highly integrated modules or architectures incorporating more discrete components
Fig 1 shows the fundamentals of
mea-suring heart rate signals, which depend
on the heart rate pressure wave being optically extracted from tissue It displays the travel path of the light entering the skin The expansion and contraction of the capillaries — caused by the heart rate pressure wave — modulate the light signal injected into the tissue by the green LEDs
The received signal is greatly
attenu-ated by the travel through the skin and is picked up by a photodiode and sent to the electronic subsystem for processing The amplitude modulation due to the pulse is detected, analyzed, and displayed
A fundamental approach to HRM tem design uses a custom-programmed, off-the-shelf MCU that controls the puls-ing of external LED drivers and simul-taneously reads the current output of a discrete photodiode Note that the current output of the photodiode must be con-verted to voltage to drive analog-to-digital
sys-(A/D) blocks The schematic in Fig 2
shows the outline of such a system.Here, it’s worth noting that the I-to-V converter creates a voltage equal to VREF
at 0 photodiode current, and the voltage decreases with increasing current
HRM building blocks
The current pulses generally used in heart rate systems are between 2 mA and 300 mA, depending on the color
of the subject’s skin and the intensity of sunlight with which the desired signal needs to compete The infrared (IR) radiation in sunlight passes through skin tissue with little attenuation, unlike the desired green LED light, and can swamp the desired signal unless the green light
is very strong or unless an expensive IR blocking filter is added
Generally speaking, the intensity
of the green LED light, where it enters the skin, is between 0.1 and three times the intensity of sunlight Due to heavy attenuation by the tissue, the signal that arrives at the photodiode is quite weak and generates just enough current to al-low for a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) — 70 to 100 dB — due to shot noise even in the presence of perfect, noise-free op-amps and A/D converters.The shot noise is due to the finite number of electrons received for every reading that occurs at 25 Hz The photodiode sizes used in the design are between 0.1 mm2 and 7 mm2 Howev-
er, above 1 mm, there are diminishing returns due to the effect of sunlight.The difficult and costly function blocks to implement in an optical heart
rate system design, as shown in Fig 2, are
the fast, high-current V-to-I converters
Fig 3: An integrated heart rate sensor requires only external LEDs.
Fig 4: A highly integrated HRM sensor module incorporating all essential components.
Trang 17that drive the LED, a
current-to-volt-age converter for the photodiode, and
a reliable algorithm in the MCU that
sequences the pulses under host control
A low-noise LED driver — featuring 300
mA and 75–100 dB SNR — that can be
set to very low currents down to 2 mA
while still creating very narrow light
pulses down to 10 µs is an expensive
block to achieve with discrete op-amps
The narrow pulses of light down to 10
µs, shown in Fig 2, allow the system to
tolerate motion and sunlight Typically,
two light measurements are made for
each 25-Hz sample One measurement is
taken with LEDs turned off and one with
LEDs turned on The calculated
differ-ence removes the effect of ambient light
and gives the desired raw optical signal
measurement that is insensitive to the
flickering background light
The short duration of the optical
pulses both allows and requires a
rela-tively strong light pulse It is essential to
stay brighter than the sunlight signal,
which may be present and not allow the
PPG signal carrier to be dwarfed by the
sunlight signal
If the sunlight signal is larger than
the PPG carrier, then although it may be
removed by subtraction, the signal can
be so large that external modulation such
as swinging an arm in and out of shadow
can create difficult-to-remove artifacts
As a result, systems that use low-current
LED drivers and large photodiodes can
suffer severely from motion artifacts in
bright-light situations
Discrete vs integrated design
Much of the desired HRM sensing
func-tionality is available pre-designed and
integrated into a single device Packing
most of this functionality into one piece
of silicon results in a relatively small 3 x
3-mm package that can even integrate
the photodiode itself
Fig 3 shows an example of a
sche-matic with an optical sensor This HRM
design is relatively easy to implement
You just need to focus on the optical
por-tion of the design, which includes optical
blocking between the parts on the board
and coupling the system to the skin
While the approach shown in Fig 3
results in a high-performance HRM tion, it’s not as small or power-efficient as some designers would like To achieve an even smaller solution, the LED die and the control silicon must be integrated into a single package that incorporates all essential functions, including the optical blocking and the lenses that improve the
solu-LED output Fig 4 illustrates this more
integrated approach, based on a Silicon Labs Si117x optical sensor
No external LEDs are required for this HRM design The LEDs and photodiode are all internal to the module, which can
be installed right below the optical ports
at the back of a wearable product such as
a smartwatch This approach enables a shorter distance between the LEDs and photodiode than is possible with a dis-crete design The reduced distance allows operation at extremely low power due to lower optical losses traversing the skin
Integrating the LEDs also addresses the issue of light leakage between the LEDs and photodiode so that the designer doesn’t have to add optical blocking to the PCB
The alternative to this approach is to handle the blocking with plastic or foam inserts and special copper layers on the PCB
There is one more part of an HRM design that developers don’t necessarily need to create: an HRM algorithm This software block residing on the host pro-cessor is quite complex due to the signal corruption that occurs during exercise and motion in general End-user motion often creates its own signal that spoofs the actual heart rate signal and is sometimes falsely recognized as the heart rate beat
If a wearable developer or manufacturer doesn’t have the resources to develop the algorithm, third-party vendors provide this software on a licensed basis It is up to the designer to decide how much integra-tion is right for the HRM application The developer can simplify the design process and speed time-to-market by opting for a highly integrated module-based approach using a licensed algorithm
Developers with in-depth optical sensing expertise, time, and resources may opt to use separate components — sensors, photodiodes, lenses, etc — and
do their own system integration and even create their own HRM algorithm ☐
ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS • electronicproducts.com • APRIL 2018
FEATURE 15
Discrete Semiconductors
Trang 18Artificial intelligence (AI), electrification, and
in-cab-in entertain-cab-inment are just some of the revolutionary
changes underway for automobiles, causing a complete
rethink of how an automobile should be designed and used
They’re also cause for designers to rethink their own role in the
automotive design chain
From a semiconductor and components environmental
per-formance point of view, the same rules apply, namely AEC-Q100,
which has been around since 1994 This defines the temperature,
humidity, and other reliability factors Since 1994, however, much
has changed, and soon, “auto” mobiles will start living up to their
name, thanks in large part to advances in sensor integration, AI,
Moore’s Law, and some people in remote regions making a living
by tagging images to make smart systems more accurate
For example, accurate labeling can make the difference
between distinguishing between the sky and the side of a
truck Mighty AI is one company focused on ensuring accurate
tagging using teams of humans spread globally According to its
founder, S “Soma” Somasegar, there is a large role for humans
in this loop for a long time to come “We’re not building a
sys-tem to play a game; we’re building a syssys-tem to save lives,” said
Mighty AI CEO Daryn Nakhuda.1
Getting to the point at which autonomous vehicles can be
considered relatively safe for everyday use is an interesting
challenge that has captured the imagination of automobile
OEMs and electronic system designers and spurred innovations
in sensors, processing, and communications
For some time, it was believed that LiDAR would be the
critical breakthrough technology that would enable
auton-omous vehicles, but now, developers have realized that it’s a
combination of every sensor input possible, including sonar,
high-definition cameras, LiDAR, and radar, all to ensure
accu-rate ranging and identification of objects According to GM, the
autonomous version of its Chevy Volt electric vehicle (EV) has
40 more sensors and 40% more hardware
Lowering the cost and power consumption of that
hard-ware, especially for advanced image processing, is one of many
critical enabling factors for autonomous vehicles To that end,
Dream Chip Technologies announced an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) system-on-chip (SoC) for computer vision at Mobile World Congress (MWC) that greatly increases performance while lowering power consumption
The ADAS SoC was developed in collaboration with Arm, ArterisIP, Cadence, GlobalFoundries (GF), and Invecas as part
of the European Commission’s ENIAC THINGS2DO reference development platform It was developed on GF’s 22FDX tech-nology to lower the power required for AI and neural network (NN) processing so that it can be embedded into a vehicle without the need for active cooling techniques, which can add weight, size, and cost while increasing the probability of failure.The SoC uses Dream Chip’s image signal-processing pipe-line, Tensilica’s (Cadence) P6 DSPs, and a quad-cluster of Arm Cortex-A53 processors to get to 1 tera operations per second (TOPS) with a power consumption “in the single digits.”
Distributed vs centralized sensor processing
The low-power performance of Dream Chip Technologies’ SoC
at low power for image processing is critical, given that latency needs to be minimized to avoid incidents The further that a ve-hicle can see, and the sooner that it can process what it sees, the safer a vehicle will become However, as mentioned, there are many sensors required for reasonably intelligent decision-mak-ing, which raises the question of where and how all of those sensor inputs should be processed
Sensor fusion techniques are well-known in applications such
as drones, in which gyroscopes, accelerometers, and tometers are managed in such a way that the benefits of each are accentuated and the negatives attenuated How can this be done for autonomous vehicles with so many and varied sensors?
magne-To tackle this, Mentor Graphics decided to work backwards and start with Level 5 autonomy in mind Its approach is called DRS360 and it takes (fuses) raw sensor data from LiDAR, radar, and cameras and processes it to develop a 360-degree real-time view of vehicle surroundings The centralized approach reduces latencies but does require a high level of centralized processing, which Mentor provides using Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC FPGAs with its advanced NN algorithms The alternative is to
do the image, LiDAR, or radar processing locally at the sensor and send the results upstream, but that approach doesn’t scale
as efficiently as DRS360, nor does it take full advantage of idly changing and evolving algorithms The downside is a single point of failure, but built-in redundancies and good design can offset that
rap-The importance of automotive sensors is not lost on the MIPI Alliance, which is bringing its experience with defining sensor physical-layer interfaces on mobile handsets to the rapidly evolving automotive space On Oct 7, it announced the formation of the MIPI Automotive Working Group (AWG) to
AI alters auto design challenges
Getting to the point at which autonomous vehicles
can be considered safe for everyday use is a
challenge that has captured the imagination of
automobile OEMs, spurring innovations in sensors,
processing, and communications.
Automobile designers need to incorporate new approaches as change comes quickly
BY PATRICK MANNION
Contributing Editor