We tend to be gratified when our electronic gadgets play nice with each other, and conversely, frustrated when they don’t. For example, back when I favored Android mobile devices, I had great fun “rooting” my phones and flashing custom ROMs that came from who-knows-where. I’d do a little tinkering with the source code myself, sometimes dropping in patches for bugs, and then compiling the result. But on occasion, those neat-looking custom ROMs would break things and cause connectivity problems with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and so on. It could be inconvenient, to say the least.
My wife and daughter both had iPhones, and texting reliably between my no-longer-stock Android phones and their iPhones eventually became so problematic that my exasperated spouse put her foot down and demanded that I ditch Android and get with the Apple program. When I relented, I was chagrined to find that with iPhones, everything just… works. No glitchy connectivity, no text messages that never arrive (or arrive hours after being sent). Compatibility—what a concept!
If getting a text to one’s spouse is a big deal, how much bigger of a deal is it when systems compatibility is a matter of life and death? This is literally the case with military weapons systems, especially when one service branch’s systems need to talk to those of another.
The Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) has been around for a while now, and it holds great promise for achieving full compatibility between sensor-based systems of the Air Force, Army, and Navy. It’s by no means a trivial undertaking for these three branches to settle on common ground on which their respective systems can cooperate. But the SOSA effort represents an opportunity for them to, for starters, agree on specifications for backplanes and modules for future weapons systems.
Check out Jack Browne’s “status report” on SOSA: how and why it came about, where it’s been, and most importantly, where it’s going. For designers of these nascent weapons systems of tomorrow, it’s a must-read for keeping up-to-date on the modernization of our armed forces’ equipment. And for the eventual “consumers” of these systems—the men and women in uniform who must rely on them—it could mean the difference between staying alive, or not.
For an example of a commercial vendor’s efforts at SOSA compliance, see my story on Pentek’s Quartz model 5550 RFSoC board, which comes packaged in a carrier module that aligns with the technical standard for the SOSA reference architecture.