Last month, after almost two years of remote meetings due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the long-awaited Tri-Service Open Architecture Interoperability Demonstration (TSOA-ID) and Technical Interchange Meeting took place in person near Patuxent River, MD. This meeting of the minds brought together 450+ people to discuss how the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) is ushering in the next generation of electronic systems for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Building on the momentum behind C5ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards (CMOSS) and the release of The Open Group Sensor Open Systems Architecture™ (SOSA) v1.0 specification in late 2021, many of the constituent hardware plug-in cards in this ecosystem are now available from vendors in the form of single board computer cards, ethernet networking cards, FPGA processing cards, position/navigation/timing (PNT) cards, and of course, software-defined radio (SDR) cards. Any of these plug-in cards can then be integrated into a similarly-aligned chassis to provide a complete CMOSS/SOSA-aligned hardware solution to a range of different requirements focused on signals intelligence (SIGINT), electronic warfare (EW), communications, and radar.
Epiq Solutions was eager to participate with teams from Abaco Systems, LCR Embedded, and Sciens Innovations for TSOA-ID. Several weeks prior to the show, we all began working through what could be achieved by pooling our solutions together. In the end, we were able to demonstrate the advantage of modular principles espoused in SOSA standards by using our Sidekiq™ VPX400 SDR card interfaced with an Abaco SBC3511 single board computer card, connected over 40 GbE. We then installed each plug-in card into the DK3 OpenVPX chassis from LCR Embedded Systems, and utilized Sciens Innovations’ Helux reference design to provide a MORA 2.4 compliant interface to our Sidekiq VPX400 SDR. With support for four phase-coherent transmit and receive channels up to 200 MHz wide each, the demonstrated solution showed how, collectively, all these elements came together to enable rapid development of software applications to push the boundaries of RF control into the sub-6 GHz spectrum.
While the day’s events at Pax River were exciting, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Even through the pandemic, the momentum around MOSA and CMOSS/SOSA has continued to grow. This is partly in response to the U.S. DoD’s goals to accelerate innovation to keep up with ever-evolving threats to warfighters, and also to the ongoing efforts of those who participate in MOSA and CMOSS/SOSA. Epiq has been a member of the SOSA Consortium since 2019, and we actively participate on the Hardware Sub-Committee of SOSA’s Technical Working Group. Being a part of watershed moments where the future of rapid innovation for defense electronics is so apparent, we can’t help but look to the future and to continuing our work within the network of partners and customers that stand behind the MOSA evolution in support of our warfighters.
If you missed the in-person TSOA-ID event, you can find the resources from the meeting here: https://tsoa-id.net/resources/. To learn more about our Sidekiq VPX400 software defined radio, or any of our other SWaP-C optimized SDRs, visit us at https://epiqsolutions.com/rf-transceiver/, or email us at info@epiqsolutions.com.