Top commanders seek to embed EW capability at virtually all echelons as warfighters seek to make up for years of lost time.

In order to keep up with the continued acceleration of new technology and to be able to protect the warfighter from the latest threats, it is essential that we can turn our deployed platforms into adaptable entities that can evolve over time and are not static. The SOSA [Sensor Open Systems Architecture] Technical Standard is the next major step in realizing this goal.

Today’s embedded-system designers have a great variety of processor types to select from, with FPGAs and GPUs adding their own various advantages and disadvantages for consideration in contrast to the more familiar CPUs.

Tammy Carter and David Jedynak discuss how huge data demands are pushing radar and electronic warfare (EW) developers to seek new ways to deliver multifunction systems that also meet strict size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements.

J.R. Wilson with Military & Aerospace Electronics considers how Passive sensor systems may be ready to come into their own, as high-performance embedded computing technology becomes powerful enough to handle massive computing loads.

Denis Smetana discusses the design approaches for implementing beamforming processing tasks using GPU, DSP and FPGA processors.