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There's C++ in there, they bill it as such.

We were once required to use a MIL-STD-1760 processor with Ada or other military languages; now we use commercial PowerPC with C++."

source

Here's their toolchain: https://www.ghs.com/AerospaceD...

From RTOS to IDE to Compiler, GHS the only name in this space.

It's more or less a PowerPC G4 right down to the Firewire bus.

Components were billed as "COTS". However those chips were still back when they were Motorola/Freescale

The system departed from the historical use of low speed Mil-Std-1553B busses, using the high speed Fibre Channel-Avionics Environment (FC-AE) serial bus for high speed internal interconnects.

built around PowerPC RISC processors - essentially a bigger and faster cousin to the 6U VME packaged PowerPC processors now being used in F-15E, F/A-18E/F and F-111C Block C-4.

"So we have designed for technology refresh, so at the appropriate time we can stop putting in the 1 GHz processor board and swap out to the 2 GHz board without having to go back and do any redesign. We were once required to use a MIL-STD-1760 processor with Ada or other military languages; now we use commercial PowerPC with C++."

http://www.ausairpower.net/APA...

https://www.militaryaerospace....

Your link is circular back to this same slashdot article, but a google search of your link title finds this:

https://www.militaryaerospace....

This is cool, thanks!

Also interesting:

An alternate approach that doesn't require expensive radiation hardening also seems to have worked with a half-day transition through the Van Allen belt. It will be interesting to see if their approach can stand up over time on a long mission.

Er, "IEEE 1394 and Power ISA v.2.03".

Working in automotive I understand how "vintage" tech makes it into "current" production: Timelines, budgets, work with what is known to work. That said, it is entertaining to read press releases from last decade surrounding what is going into the F35.

The 'high speed data bus' is IEEE 1394b. It's running on Freescale/NXP/Qualcomm PowerPC embedded processors designed off of the PowerPC G4 (in triplicate) built by the GreenHills compiler. I haven't found any info on it but I'd hate to see what version of Matlab/Simulink they're stuck with as well. Likely 6.5 or R13.

The problem with that was it was pitched as a "COTS" system to save cost. None of those products are "commercial off the shelf" solutions anymore. The hayday of the G4 in mass quantities is gone. I wonder how much money Freescale is guaranteed to keep fab lines up and running for a chip designed in the 90s. I also want to know how the NXP acquisition went through.

End of the day the feds would have probably been better off just making their own CPU and fab lines.

http://www.militaryaerospace.c...

Frankly, it would likely be much cheaper and just as effective to buy some of those for the US Air Force rather than the F-35.

The F-35 is too small to do all that it is asked to do. It doesn't carry enough bombs, it doesn't fly fast enough, it isn't stealthy enough, and it isn't a dogfighter.

Two engines, not one, are needed to really be an effective plane. Yes, the F-16 is a great airplane, once you already have effective control of the skies, but you need the F-15 to get that control.

The F-22 wasn't built in large enough numbers to provide that.

I know the US Navy has performed experiments using lasers for submarine-to-surface comms - no idea on how well that went.

How much does a 300km spool of fiber optic cable weigh again? :-)

I wonder if sound would provide a very low bandwidth channel? If you can get good coupling into the ice ot should transmit sound relatively well.

The basic technique is called a Magneto-Optical Trap, or MOT for short, although they probably use a few extra steps to create a Bose-Einstein condensate. As an atomic physicist, I have a couple of MOTs in my lab, and the whole thing will easily fit in a 1-meter long box. These things are actually being miniaturized quite effectively, and sensor packages using cold atoms are being built that fit in your hand. I bet a government-sponsored project could get them a bit smaller still. For example, here's a story about a DARPA project that's working to make a cold-atom based inertial guidance package for missiles that will be 20 cm^3.

Pentagon not considering it? http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2011/07/cots-and-open-standards.html

i386 processors in space? Where? You do realize the article that reported upgrades of the Space Shuttles' AP-101s to 386 processors was an April Fools joke, right?

Is this the good kind of security breach, which enables end users to do new things with their FPGAs? Or the bad kind, that enables attackers to do malicious things with others FPGAs? Or both?

This attack is only useful when an FPGA is programmed by a third-party manufacturer using a canned encrypted bitstream provided by someone else. This is the case for many products nominally made by US, Japanese, or Taiwanese firms but actually built in China. The attack allows someone with access to the encrypted bitstream to recover the unencrypted bitstream, from which they can potentially reverse-engineer the device and make changes.

An end user, who has only the programmed FPGA, can't do anything with this attack.

For background, here's a short note on where this technology is used.

Speaking of flexibility (some rate is better than none), the area of using the troposphere has improved. It just gives one more means to fling data (just not at sat. rates).

http://www.militaryaerospace.com/index/display/article-display/5580772754/articles/military-aerospace-electronics/online-news-2/2010/12/army-orders_long-range.html