Military system designers aren't resting on COTS deployment

As ground vehicles employ more electronic sensing, control and communication systems, design engineers are increasingly utilizing more commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) modules. Though COTS slashes development time and cost, it's still difficult for many military users to find COTS boards that meet their low-volume demands for ruggedization and redundancy.

Sensing and computing systems in vehicles get more complex, so there's increased interest in modules based on the VME and Open VPX, a successor to the venerable VME bus, created by the VITA Trade Association, according to several speakers at the recent Embedded Tech Trends conference. More military projects are adopting open architectures that offer a number of production-ready computing and sensing boards.