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MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS Resource Guide But there is a downside to this latter point, especially if you’re one of the prime contractors. If I were the CEO of one of those primes, I’d be looking at some of the recent movement in the industry and asking myself: “What’s going on here?” And I might well conclude that companies that were once my suppliers are now moving up the food chain to position themselves to compete with me. From Radstone’s perspective, we’re also clear on our place in the grand scheme of things: we have no ambitions to serve the military directly. You’ll never hear me being reported as having said that “Our customers are our competitors.” MIL EMBEDDED: So are serial switched fabrics for real or just hype? Where might the military really use this technology? CAVILL: There’s no doubt about it in our mind that switched fabrics are for real because of what they bring to the military market in terms of performance. The fact is, despite what anyone might claim, you just can’t get the system throughput with today’s shared bus architectures. Those will continue to have a role – VME looks destined to go on forever – but our view is that the two will coexist, with the bus providing the legacy compatibility and the switched fabric providing the raw performance. MIL EMBEDDED: How does Tech Refresh, Tech Insertion, and Spiral Development really work in practice? CAVILL: Take the Radstone G4DSP-XE [a quad PowerPC processing card], for example: it’s true to say that, in effect, that was a product at the same time as the original G4DSP was first conceived – we just announced it later, but it was built in to the original design, just as the G4DSP-XE’s successor will have been. In designing the original board, we paid huge attention to the various silicon vendors’ roadmaps to ensure that there was real longevity there. Backwards compatibility was designed in from the start – as it has to be. What we know that you can’t do is to create a new product with no thought for its future. Fundamental to any new Radstone product is the principle that it will have a roadmap that will stretch out as far into the future as possible, that takes into account both planned and unplanned component obsolescence, that it will have technology refresh opportunities and that it will provide our customers with technology insertion opportunities as and when they need them. You can’t bolt those things on as an afterthought to a product that was poorly conceived in the first place. MIL EMBEDDED: Explain how your company addresses obsolescence mitigation. CAVILL: We have our Whole Program Life COTS philosophy that underpinned the establishment of the Program Life Cycle Management group which exists, exclusively and entirely, to help our customers mitigate the impact of obsolescence. There is no silver bullet solution, and there never will be. However, what we can say is that we’ve proven time and again since Radstone first came into existence that, with the right management philosophy and the necessary expertise and experience, you can’t make the problem go away but you can certainly help your customers to avoid suffering the pain. The fact is that yes, obsolescence is a problem but how you respond to it is also a business opportunity. It’s an opportunity to create better customer relationships, it’s an opportunity to create differentiation, and competitive leverage and it’s an opportunity to create long term revenue streams. If there’s one thing that defines Radstone, it’s our unique and, we’d venture to say, industry-leading approach to helping our customers deal with obsolescence. MIL EMBEDDED: What are the “hottest” military programs right now? CAVILL: The really hot programs are the unmanned vehicle programs, especially Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). That’s where the action is – in programs like Predator and Global Hawk. Why? The military is committed to reducing the number of personnel it places in positions of danger so unmanned vehicles are an obvious response. It has to be said also that, in terms of value for money, unmanned vehicles deliver a lot of bang for the buck which makes them very attractive. From our point of view, it’s something that’s very exciting – not least because unmanned vehicles are huge consumers of electronics. MIL EMBEDDED: We see the type and scope of embedded and COTS technologies applicable to the military as exponentially expanding. What are the challenges of insertion, interoperability, and sustainment in this rapidly expanding universe? CAVILL: You must start out with a stable, viable architecture that is premised upon the idea that it will form the basis of a continuing flow of leading-edge but backwards-compatible products. You define the envelope in which a series of products will operate, you define the interfaces that you’ll plan to sustain over an extended period, and you design compatibility in from the very beginning. The roadmap has to be an integral part of the product concept: devising a leading-edge point solution in this market is just not going to be successful for anyone. That said, what’s key to us is finding out what the customer really wants. On occasions, we’ve been surprised to find that customers will happily exchange some degree of backwards compatibility if what they get back is a bigger step forward in performance. The default, though, is that what we produce today and tomorrow will provide the continuity and compatibility that characterize most military programs. Peter Cavill received a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Loughborough University in 1968 and an M.Sc. in Microelectronics and Semiconductor Technology from Southampton University in 1970. He then worked as a design engineer at GEC Semiconductors, then at Fairchild as Manager of the European Design centre. From 1979 to 1989 Peter worked at Inmos as Director of the Microsystems Business and was responsible for the team that developed and marketed the transputer. In 1993, following a two year period as CEO of Anamartic Ltd., and a short period with Spider <strong>Systems</strong> he joined Radstone Technology as Director of the Industrial Products Division. Peter is currently president of Radstone’s main <strong>Embedded</strong> Computing business. For further information, contact Peter at: Radstone <strong>Embedded</strong> Computing 50 Tice Boulevard Woodcliff Lake, NJ 07677-7645 Tel: 800-368-2738 Fax: 201-391-2899 E-mail: sales@radstone.com Website: www.radstone.com MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS Resource Guide <strong>2005</strong> / 49
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