The theme of the just-concluded 2019 Embedded Tech Trends (ETT) media event was “The Future is Now.” Eighteen sponsor companies presented to industry media the new technologies that the companies believe can solve embedded computing’s thornier challenges. While ETT typically leans more toward military and aerospace technologies, media participants from various market areas did attend.

PICMG president Jess Isquith presented on behalf of the open standard development organization for embedded computing. Her theme was PICMG’s 25 years in the industry, highlighting the successes of the architectures that have been used in a highly diverse range of applications and markets. These include military and aerospace, test and measurement, research/physics, medical, communications, railway, energy, UAV/drones, and kiosk/gaming. She also spoke about the mutual cooperation with VITA and the continuing strong relationship between standards groups. Finally, Jess outlined the new PICMG efforts in the areas of IIoT, rugged COM Express, COM HPC, and 40GbE MicroTCA.

Several of the sponsor company presentations covered OpenVPX development-related initiatives, while others talked about ruggedization, thermal, signal integrity, bandwidth/speed, and security/compliance challenges and solutions. From a PICMG perspective, it was encouraging to see other company presentations that included CompactPCI Serial, AdvancedTCA, and COM Express. These technologies continue to see success in military and aerospace applications, despite being initially mostly targeted at other market segments when the specifications were created.  

One of PICMG’s new officers, treasurer Dylan Lang, spoke on open standards: One of his key mantras was and is the importance of active participation and getting involved early in the specification development process. There appeared to be enthusiastic agreement from the assemblage on this important message from Dylan’s presentation. 

As the year progresses, it will be exciting to see the ways in which these open standard computing architectures help solve the challenges of tomorrow – today – fulfilling the theme “The Future Is Now.”