The Connected Battlefield: looking back

20 December 2017
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As 2017 draws to a close, it’s an opportune time to look back over another year of The Connected Battlefield. Visitors to our blog, and subscribers to the digest we publish every month (see “Stay in the Loop” to the right) have grown substantially, which is very satisfying.

Back in January, we kicked off with a 2-part post discussing the transformational potential of GPU technology and what Abaco is doing in that space. We lifted the curtain on what AXIS ImageFlex can do (it was officially announced in April) in making the development of sophisticated graphics applications faster and easier. The team also contributed three posts looking forward 12 months: they’ll be reprising their crystal ball gazing next month.

January also saw the first of many posts from the numerous shows we’ve been at: this time, it was Embedded Tech Trends. The month concluded with a review of the architecture that many expected to be dead by now, but which is, in fact, very much alive. Yes, we’re talking about VME.

Posts that have proven very popular have been those we’ve made ‘live’ from events like the NVIDIA TX2 launch in San Francisco, AUSA, the Intel AI Summit, Quad-A, GTC, IDEF and Embedded World among many others. If you couldn’t be there personally, we tried to give you an insight into what was going on. In the words of The Beach Boys (well, almost): we get around.

Background

In March, we discussed the background to our introduction of the SWE540 3U VPX 40 Gigabit Ethernet switch, as well as the thinking behind the launch of the 40 Gigabit Ethernet data plane SBC367D single board computer – the ideal companion to the SWE540, and helping to bring true high performance embedded computing to the 3U VPX world.

Some topics are just too interesting to be limited to a single post – so May saw us publish a 2-parter on OpenWare, our open source-based network management system. Like many of our posts, it gave our readers excellent insight into the thinking behind the development of a product – something a data sheet can never hope to do.

In June, we returned to a topic that’s close to our hearts – and close to our customers’ hearts. When we acquired 4DSP back in November last year, we – and our customers – gained access to huge expertise and experience in FPGA technology, and everything it means in terms of performance, flexibility and upgradability. The subject of the post on this occasion were the newly-announced VP880 3U VPX rugged high performance signal processing board and the FMC134 FMC+ FPGA Mezzanine Card Direct RF Conversion Module.

Next week, we’ll take a look at what the second half of the year had in store for visitors to The Connected Battlefield.

 

 

Main image owned by Jeff Legge, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Ian McMurray

Ian McMurray started his 40-year career in the technology industry back when 4K wasn’t the latest TV resolution — it was as much memory as you needed to write a complete, integrated accounting system for a computer. He started life as a mainframe salesman but eventually succumbed to the lure of marketing, and has since held a variety of European and worldwide marketing management positions, as well as occasional forays into sales training and development. He’s now the PR guy for Abaco Systems, and is based in Towcester, England.