DSEI Day 2: MOSA, SOSA of interest to U.K. and European defense integrators

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September 13, 2023

LONDON. Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) Consortium members exhibiting at DSEI 2023 tell me there is considerable interest in the SOSA Technical Standard and in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) modular open systems approach (MOSA) even if there is not an official MOSA mandate like the one from the DoD.

There is quite a bit of interest in SOSA and SOSA aligned products within the U.K., says Noah Donaldson, chief technical officer, Annapolis Micro Systems; not so much in continental Europe, yet, he adds.

What fuels the adoption of MOSA and SOSA in the U.S. is that – along with the MOSA mandate – there are big programs requiring SOSA aligned products, says Bob Kirk, sales and business development leader at Annapolis Micro Systems. 

What also drives SOSA is the demand for high-density VPX products, as VPX has been adopted by the SOSA Technical Standard, says Nigel Norman, CEO of Sarsen Technology, a U.K.-based distributor of embedded FPGA, GPU and computing hardware, software, and IP for high-performance applications. The aforementioned Annapolis Micro Systems is one of his clients. There is a demand for higher density with a smaller number of channels, and VPX solutions enable that, Norman adds.

There is also demand for more interoperability – and SOSA has made VPX even more interoperable, Donaldson notes.

Many international customers are dipping their toes into SOSA, as it addresses many of the problems they are looking to solve, but education is needed, says Mark Littlefield, director of system products at Elma Electronic. There are a lot of misconceptions about SOSA, with the main one being that it is limited only to U.S. companies, but that is not true.

Littlefield also says that he is seeing interest at DSEI for QMC VITA 93 (Small Form Factor Mezzanine) products.

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