Ron Mastro thrived in the military electronics market and took great pride that his little publishing niche covered an institution – the U.S. military – that he loved and respected.

Could silicon become a thing of the past?; Boeing and U.S. Army sign trio of contracts; USAF, Italy, Australia benefit from Lockheed mod; Standard Missile-3 gets more support. (U.S. Army photo by Tech. Benjamin Faske)

The embedded COTS community is offering various Small Form Factor (SFF) flavors - off-the-shelf or customized - while industry groups such as VITA are developing standards to provide some order to the growing SFF demand. (Photo courtesy of Parvus Corporation)

Cache partitioning reduces worst-case execution time for critical tasks, thereby enhancing CPU utilization, especially for multicore applications. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Dana Rosso)

While historically single-vendor procured, today's airborne systems utilized by the U.S. DoD need to instead comply with the DoD's vision of more cost-efficient, reusable, modular, standards-based applications ready for flight in both manned and unmanned airspace. Standards such as the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE), ARINC 653 and 661, and DO-178C are helping the military avionics industry achieve this paradigm.

Thermal analysis is performed on an aircraft engine ECU.

Mezzanine modules are an important design element to many board form factors. They grew out of a necessity to gain more board real estate or to incorporate modular flexibility to the original form factor. In the early days, few, if any, standards for mezzanines existed. However, over time, standards emerged to make it easier to incorporate mezzanines into designs.