Design engineering is more than a mere balancing act between finding the best options among a sea of possibilities, and then implementing those options through the careful orchestration of available resources. To fully manage the challenges of the design process, it is also necessary to develop an instinct for choosing design paths and system configurations that provide some measure of flexibility. This maintains wiggle room as projects advance toward completion, often creating “an angel in the architecture” to serve as a countermeasure for situations in which “the devil is in the details.”

As electronics systems become more complex, a new generation of tools will be needed to nurture this instinct in the emerging generation of military design engineers. For example, a vital capability for the next-generation of design tools will be the ability to forecast the platform-level impact of changes to fundamental system components. This can be accomplished through the use of advanced simulator applications operating in integrated design environments.

In the first feature of this issue of Defense Electronics, Ansoft presents a tool suite with these capabilities that can also integrate EM and circuit simulations. In this article, these tools are applied to the design of an airborne radar system's phased-array antenna. The insight and savings these tools can provide to designers of similar applications becomes readily apparent in this example.

The instinct for developing flexible design architectures can be further refined using hardware that is inherently flexible. Few components achieve this as effectively as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and this flexibility is further leveraged by design tools that can configure these devices and then simulate their performance. This provides the same system-level insight into the impact of FPGA-configuration changes as the previously mentioned EM simulation tools provide for RF-component changes.

In the second feature of this issue, Altera discusses substituting relatively inflexible DSPs with FPGAs for front-end signal processing in radars or sonars. In addition to sophisticated hard-wired computational engines available in FPGAs, design software and services can be used to implement advanced signal-processing functions as customized FPGA configurations, giving critical flexibility should design changes be necessary. The use of FPGAs can also add flexibility to the power budget of radar and sonar applications, as mentioned in the article.

Interestingly, flexible architectures can even be used for the compliance of strict standards relating to sensitive data. For example, in order to comply with the requirements of levels three and four of FIPS 140.2 (a standard that defines the requirements of IT products used by the U.S. government for sensitive, but unclassified uses), tamper-detection components must have the ability for the designers to attach their own external sensors.

As discussed by Maxim in the third feature, one family of secure supervisors meets this requirement by providing inputs specifically for that purpose. These same devices include an ingenious battery-backed SRAM architecture that can securely store sensitive data (such as a digital encryption key) for extended time periods without leaving a physical imprint. This imprinting occurs in conventional SRAM architectures, and can be used by unauthorized parties to recover previously stored data.

However, the theme of flexibility extends beyond design engineering and was recently echoed in this year's celebration of Veteran's Day. Before becoming a federal holiday in 1954, Veteran's Day was first celebrated locally in my hometown of Emporia, Kansas on Nov. 11, 1953. It grew out of the original Armistice Day that had always been celebrated on Nov. 11 to honor the veterans of WWI. That first local celebration spawned by the efforts of Emporia shoe salesman Al King — and all the nationwide celebrations of Veteran's Day that followed has provided the measure of flexibility needed to properly honor all American veterans.

The theme of flexibility is also apparent in another tribute to veterans, the “Creating Futures” program (www.creatingfutures.us) provided through the CompTIA Educational Foundation. This program provides a variety of free training and career placement services in the field of information technology to several underserved populations, including transitioning veterans and wounded veterans. As such, the Creating Futures program is also a reciprocal gesture, since the service of all veterans — past and present — has created a future for us.

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