Published in Military & Aerospace Electronics
Written by John Keller
An emerging open-architecture embedded computing standard that offers to enable the U.S. military to specify embedded computing systems that are economical, powerful, upgradable, and competitive, could be finished and ratified by as early as this summer.
The Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) today is in a preliminary form called snapshot-two. Its third snapshot iteration is expected by the end of this year, and its first official version, SOSA version 1, is expected by mid-2020, says John Bowling, U.S. Air Force Technical Expert for Avionics Architectures and Interoperability.
Bowling made his comments Monday during a SOSA news conference at the Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) annual meeting in Washington. Bowling is part of the Engineering and Technical Management/Services directorate of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and chairs the SOSA Business Working Group segment of The Open Group in San Francisco.
SOSA is to be an open-systems industry standard for military and commercial sensor systems to use modular design and widely supported nonproprietary standards for key sensor and embedded computing interfaces.
It will revolve around computer processing and networking for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) in a technical and business collaboration that involves such systems as radar, electro-optics, infrared sensors, signals intelligence (SIGINT), electronic warfare (EW), and communications.