Introduction Medical imaging equipment lives close to radiation. CT scanners, angiography suites, C-arms, linear accelerators, and PET/SPECT scanners all place sensitive electronics near an active radiation source. Sometimes the electronics sit just centimeters away. Over years of use, this exposure adds up. It can quietly damage boards that were never built to survive it. This […]
Introduction In rugged embedded computing, it’s tempting to treat every new form factor as a replacement for the last one. VNX+ is often described that way, as “the next VPX” or “VPX, but smaller.” That framing misses the point. VPX (ANSI/VITA 46/48/65) and VNX+ (ANSI/VITA 90) were never meant to compete for the same slot […]
If you have worked with the Microchip PolarFire SoC architecture, specifically on customized hardware modules like the SundanceDSP SE301 / SOM1-SoC or PolarBerry, you quickly realize that traditional embedded boot mechanics do not apply here. Unlike an ARM chip that searches for an MBR or a FAT32 partition to find a bootloader, the PolarFire SoC […]
FMC-GPIO module: the split-architecture design ships as an FMC module, a matching auxiliary card, and two flex cables. Full product page and STEP files. The Hook: Why Your FMC Breakout Board Is Fighting You Every FPGA engineer who has built a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) rig, a signal-communications testbed, or a rapid-prototyping bench has run into […]
1. Introduction: The High-Stakes Shift to Secure Edge Computing For decades, embedded systems engineering treated security as a software-layer afterthought, a firmware patch, a TLS stack, a password policy bolted onto hardware that was never designed to resist a determined physical adversary. That model collapses the moment a system leaves a controlled data center and […]
Achieving Sub-Microsecond (Nanosecond-Class) Multi-Axis Motor Synchronization 1. Introduction: The Multi-Axis Synchronization Problem Multi-axis robotic cells, high-speed CNC gantries, and packaging assembly lines share a common structural dependency. Every actuator’s position and velocity trajectories must be continuously phase-locked to every other actuator’s trajectory for the duration of the motion profile. A six-axis robotic arm performing a […]
Introduction Embedded systems are rapidly evolving beyond traditional centralized computing models. Today’s industrial, defense, communications, and AI applications increasingly require intelligent processing at the edge, where data is generated. These systems must deliver high performance while maintaining low power consumption, strong security, deterministic operation, and long-term deployment flexibility. The PolarBerry platform addresses these requirements by […]
SE2000 + FMC-ADC500CD The four-part “Versal Gen 2 and SDR” series is now complete. It covered architectural evolution, decoupling vector math operations, solving data starvation challenges, and the critical path from model to mission in Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications. This supplementary article directly responds to the many defense and aerospace organizations that have reached […]
Verifying and Deploying Next-Gen Waveforms The final stage of any advanced SDR or DSP system is bridging the gap from algorithmic models to reliable mission deployment, especially in aerospace and defense environments. The AMD Versal Gen 2 AI Edge SoC on the SundanceDSP SE2000 3U VPX module with FMC-ADC500CD transforms this process through superior runtime […]
Enhanced NoC and the Distributed Memory Matrix In high-performance SDR and DSP systems, raw vector compute capability is necessary but insufficient. Sustained performance is overwhelmingly gated by memory bandwidth, on-chip data movement, and the ability to keep compute tiles fed without introducing jitter or breaking phase continuity. This is especially true on the Sundance SE2000 […]