整合：国防电子及通信电子间的界限日益模糊

作者：Sandeep Kumar，TI 市场开发业务部市场营销经理

简介：十多年前，国防与电信产业是完全不同的，可现在，情况完全变了。市场力量与技术发展推动两大产业的整合，他们目前所面临的技术问题已经日渐趋同。以下为英文全文：

Worlds converge: defense and communications electronics look more alike every day
Sandeep Kumar, marketing manager for TI's Growth Markets business unit

The first impetus behind the convergence of military/defense electronics and the telecom industry probably came from U.S. Senator William Perry, who in 1994 started a procurement reform movement known as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS). Perry’s idea was that whenever possible commercially available goods and material should be procured under military contracts. This was quite a departure from the military’s standard practice of the day which involved awarding contracts for expensive and lengthy design and development programs, followed by expensive production of systems that would be unique to a specific military program or project.

Overcoming Differences
Although it cannot be said that the embedded defense and telecom markets have converged, there are now many more similarities between them than there are disparities. For example, defense and telecom performance and cost requirements are trending closer.

Generally speaking, the defense electronics industry has always had performance as its ultimate objective. It was believed that the military’s computers, communications systems and all things electronic had to be a step or two ahead of everyone else’s electronic systems. It was a matter of national security. As a result, the cost of electronic systems was not a leading concern. Though performance still remains at the forefront of design considerations, the COTS movement has altered the approach to embedded military design. Not only has the use of COTS devices, driven by the telecom market, lowered costs, but the use of these standardized components and solutions allows more value for the investment by enhancing system usability via interoperability, longevity and risk management. Of course, there still remain other aspects of defense systems that require additional costs, including hardware and software redundancies in mission-critical systems, high-reliability and ruggedization requirements, but overall, the use of the COTS system has steadily climbed up the list of defense requirements without sacrificing performance.

In contrast, the telecom industry’s quest for performance was always tempered first and foremost by cost. The regulated environment of the past guaranteed the user base to service providers. They did not have to worry about attracting new subscribers with promises of better or more exciting services, which would have been driven by higher performing networks. Just as the COTS movement altered the direction of defense electronics, deregulation and the rise of the Internet has radically changed the path of the telecom industry. In an open world, speed, throughput, faster data rates and more bandwidth had to be delivered at attractive price points to remain competitive. Suddenly, performance moved up on the industry’s list of priorities.

Today’s telecom infrastructure is a mix of voice, video, audio and data processing elements doing functions ranging from complex signaling protocols, voice encode/decode/transcode, advanced audio, video and graphics processing, interactive voice recognition, etc. Many of these services have been in use in the military space for quite some time but on uniquely developed hardware. The telecom sector has demonstrated the viability of providing similar services based on COTS and it only makes sense for the defense industry to leverage this learning.

Defense Technologies Today
The electronic content of every country’s defense posture has increased tremendously in the last 10 to 15 years. One might wonder whether this could have been possible without the COTS movement and the fusion of defense with telecom needs.

Modern military tactics have come to rely on interconnectivity, instantaneous communication and vast but distributed computing power. That same sense of constant connectivity enabled by the same sorts of technologies can be found in today’s sophisticated wireless and wireline telecom networks. One only has to look at the smart weapons technologies, signal/communication intelligence equipment, advanced voice and video communication systems employed for communications and many other services to see the similarities in hardware and software requirements between the defense and telecom sectors.

Both the defense and telecom industries are gravitating to the same means to an end. Industry standards and open source software tools as means to ensure interoperability, reduce risk and facilitate upgradeability and maintainability are just several examples. The point is that years ago, the defense industry believed that by shunning commercial systems it would stay a step ahead. Now, many of the ways and the technologies of the telecom industry have become the springboard by which the defense industry maintains its leadership.

Staying a step ahead…
One can argue that Senator Perry did the defense industry a favor with his concept of COTS. Had the defense industry maintained its old track of developing, all of its electronic systems from scratch under huge procurement contracts would today be lagging the state-of-the-art. Instead, defense systems today are a marvel to behold. A prime example is the technology used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

In such aircraft, severely challenged by space constraints, power limitations and thermal conditions, designers are still able to integrate an incredible array of subsystems, including radar for target acquisition, image processing, a multitude of sensors, wideband and encrypted radio communications, powerful computer processing for mission analysis systems, video cameras and compression algorithms to store video data onboard the aircraft and many others.

It is difficult to envision defense systems as complex and as sophisticated as the UAV had the defense industry not adopted many of the commercial technologies of the telecom industry. For example, the same TI multicore digital signal processors (DSPs) that are found in wireless base stations and communications infrastructure systems play a central role in various defense systems because these powerful yet low power processors have the operational characteristics defense designers are looking for.

TI’s forthcoming multicore DSPs integrate both floating point and fixed point processing to significantly shorten development cycles and accelerate the delivery of working systems to the field. Built on fast 1.2 GHz cores, these advanced DSPs deliver phenomenal performance up to 256 GMACs or 128 GFLOPs, yet their power efficient design results in low power consumption.

Floating point is important for defense applications. In most cases, floating point implementations of many algorithms take fewer cycles to execute than fixed point code (such as large FFT). In the past, when starting with MATLAB, the designers were faced with the onerous and time consuming task of converting floating point code to fixed point, to take advantage of high performance DSP. With the new integrated fixed and floating point devices from TI, designers no longer have to struggle with time to market delays, especially since the floating point ISA is fully IEEE754 compliant.

The software tools supporting these DSPs – the code composers and C compilers, as well as open source Linux OSs and GCC tools – have tremendously eased the deployment of DSPs in networking, general computing and control/monitoring applications.

Maintaining the edge
Given the advanced state of defense technology today, the trajectories of the defense industry and the telecommunications industry is clear. The image that comes to mind is not that of two ships passing in the night, but more like two ships traveling side-by-side in tandem toward a shared destination. While the defense industry will continue to leverage the commercial technology suppliers to provide the springboard on which advanced systems can be built, technology providers, like TI, will certainly continue to adapt their innovations to meet the needs of defense systems.