NEW TECHNOLOGIES
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18 May 05. QinetiQ’s high sensitivity GPS has been recognised at the annual Security Industry Innovation Awards by scooping the award for “best new electronic, communication or internet protocol product”. The award, presented earlier this week, comes at the same time as QinetiQ released an upgraded Version 2 of the software that drives the high sensitivity Q20 GPS chip, providing customers with improved performance and availability The current Q20 module, 1000 times more sensitive than standard GPS devices, has already achieved considerable success, with over 50,000 units now deployed in TETRA radios used by UK police forces and other international public safety organisations. The GPS-enabled TETRA radio, manufactured by Sepura, one of the world’s leading TETRA terminal suppliers, works in extremely low signal environments, such as city centres and even inside buildings. This allows the police and other users to know the precise location of personnel once they have left vehicles, particularly important when officers are working in potentially dangerous environments.
23 May 05. ICS (Interactive Circuits & Systems) Ltd. – part of Radstone Embedded Computing – today announced the first system-level products to be jointly developed by the two organizations. The PPC8A-572 6U VME Blade comprises a PPC8A single board computer (SBC) hosting either one or two ICS-572 PMC modules, occupying a single slot in a VME chassis; and the IMP1A-571 Rugged 3U CompactPCI Blade featuring a single PMC571 module mounted on an IMP1A single board computer. The PPC8A SBC is the latest step in Radstone’s PowerXpress roadmap, offering full compatibility with its PowerXpress predecessors, the PPC6 and PPC1A. Based on Freescale’s PowerPC 7447 processor operating at up to 1.2 GHz and the Marvell Discovery Integrated System Controller, the PPC8A can support up to a gigabyte of memory. The ICS-572 PMC module combines the best in 14-bit ADC and DAC technologies with a powerful high-density, high-speed FPGA to provide industry-leading performance for both receive and transmit applications used in radar and communications. The ICS-572 PMC module is a 2-channel card offering 105 MHz ADC, 200 MHz DAC, with up to 6 million gate onboard Xilinx FPGA and a 64-bit, 66 MHz PCI interface. The Radstone IMP1A provides powerful single board computer performance in an efficient 3U CompactPCI form factor, based on the PowerPC 7410 processor. IMP1A uses a Marvell Discovery integrated system controller, combining high-performance system control with multiple communication peripherals including high-speed serial and Ethernet ports. The ICS PMC571 provides the world’s first rugged PMC offering wide bandwidth ADC and DAC capabilities at software radio frequencies. A powerful four million gate Xilinx Virtex II FPGA provides the platform for application-specific software development, and the 64-bit, 66 MHz PCI interface supports high-speed data transfers to and from the IMP1A SBC.
25 May 05. TENET Defence announce the release of MapLink Pro 5.0, the latest version of our high performance, component based software toolkit. MapLink Pro 5.0 is a result of TENET’s continuing commitment to leading edge development. As well as continued enhancement of existing features, this release also introduces several new developments: 3D SDK, Standard MapLink concepts such as Drawing Surfaces, Data Layers, Terrain Databases and Entities are extended into the 3D space through accelerated OpenGL graphics, Spatial Data Manager (SDM).The MapLink Spatial Data Manager provides complete data configuration management for ground stations, allowing end-users to organise data efficiently, export theatre-specific datasets and catalogues, and exploit maximum benefit from metadata. Spatial Data Service SDK, The Spatial Data Services SDK provides simple & flexible access to spatial data store