Design Feature: August 18, 1994

A remote-controlled drone spying over hostile territory may not have much in common with a news helicopter following OJ Simpson's car on the freeways of Los Angeles or with a sports cameraman covering a fast-moving soccer or hockey game. However, all those scenarios need to transmit and receive images reliably, despite the twists, turns, and shakes of their cameras and the vagaries of their satellite links. Now, they can also share a solution: a digital encoder/decoder developed by the Communications Systems Division of Tadiran Ltd of Israel for that country's military remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs).

The commercial application is digital-satellite news-gathering (DSNG). In a joint binational project, Satellite Transmission Systems (STS) of Melville, NY, a California Microwave Inc company, and Tadiran have adapted the military digital encoder to build a compact exciter (the signal stage of a digital-TV transmitter) and the decoder for a receiver. STS Vice President of Marketing Keith Dunford says that, compared with existing analog links, the new digital solution provides "greater utilization of transponder resources, lower operating cost, and improved link performance." He credits the partnership with Tadiran for squeezing the development cycle from two years to only three months. Perhaps more important, he adds, his company's product is not only an example of technology conversion but also a paragon for binational company-to-company cooperation.

This cooperation flew on the wings of the Israel-US Binational Industrial R&D (BIRD) Foundation, a $110-million entity that the two countries endowed 17 years ago. The foundation pairs a US company that is strong in its market with an Israeli company that has novel technology, often developed for a defense application. BIRD uses the income from the endowment, plus royalties it collects from successful projects, to fund half of the development cost of a commercial product. So far, it has contributed to some 400 projects; half of them are paying back royalties. Among the products BIRD has hatched are many high flyers such as Chipcom's LAN controllers, Comsat's satellite-based telephone service, ComStream's satellite data modems, Informix's software, Motorola's µP-controlled irrigation systems, and Tekelec's fiber-optics analyzer. BIRD estimates that its successful projects have generated more that $3 billion in sales for the companies, as well as enough taxes in both countries to have repaid the endowment handsomely.

Aware of the synergy in these binational projects, the governments of both countries now want to build upon BIRD's house. Last January, US Secretary of Commerce Ronald J Brown was in Israel to ratify with his host Micha Harish, Minister of Industry and Trade, the formation of the US-Israeli Science and Technology Commission. Brown recognized Israel's achievements in technology and compared the influx of technical and scientific talent that immigrated to Israel in recent years from the former Soviet Union with the European scientists who sought haven in the United States in the years before World War II. He identified defense conversion as the opportunity that peace presents to Israel, offering the country "a chance to plow new resources into civilian technology." Yehoshua Gleitman, Israel's chief scientist and a member of the Commission, lists information technology, software and microelectronics, and conversion from defense as areas that will get immediate attention and in which Israel has a lot to offer.

The Commission has called for advice on some top talent familiar with the status of these technologies in both countries. In the United States, they are Craig T Fields, chairman of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp, Joyce Plotkin, executive director of the Massachusetts Computer Software Council, and George M Scalise, senior vice president of National Semiconductor. In Israel, they are Uzia Galil, president of Elron Electronic Industries, known as the country's "Mr. Electronics," Dov Frohman, general manager of chip-maker Intel Electronics, which has designed and made most of Intel's math coprocessors, and David Rubner, general manager of communications-equipment-maker ECI Telecom.

It's about profit

But the Commission has more than a mandate and blue-ribbon names. "It's about profit," says Secretary Brown. He sees it "bringing together some of the world's minds in ways that will generate new products we will sell to one another and around the world." Elliott Maxwell, director of international technology policy at the Commerce Department's Technology Administration, explains that both countries want to cooperate in conversion because their defense budgets are declining. Maxwell uses BIRD's list of successful projects as examples of technologies in which Israel is strong. "We'd like to get as much information about these technologies to US electronics engineers," he says, "and to expose them to the opportunities in conversion."

Although well-aware of the opportunities, Dunford of STS is skeptical of the role of government. After he discovered that Tadiran had the encoding technology STS needed, he had applied for funds through Advanced Research Projects Agency, under the US government's Technology Reinvestment Project. "But it was rejected, because it's not a world-shattering technology," he complains. He praises BIRD's formula of matching two companies, approving a project, and seeding it with up to $500,000 to each company, moving fast yet without interfering in the development or in the companies' agreement. "[STS and Tadiran] are 6000 miles apart! With BIRD's help, we completed the project in 90 days; government won't even open the proposal in that time!"

Two examples of Israeli-developed defense technology applied to commercial products in the United States--Tadiran's encoder for STS and Gilat's very-small-aperture terminals (VSATs) for GTE Spacenet--are BIRD projects. A third, M-Systems' PCMCIA flash-memory cards for Maxtor, is a direct license. Another example is the work of Elron, a $700-million electronics conglomerate that adopted the US-Israeli binational model as a corporate strategy, investing in both countries and transferring technology between them. It has spawned electronics companies ranging from medical-imaging pioneer Elscint to automated-inspection world-leader Orbotech and chip-maker Zoran.

Moving camera, steady picture

High-definition TV, the all-digital transmission and reception of TV signals, is still in the future. Until then, when analog transmission is poor, the solution is to digitize the signal. But it takes a lot of bandwidth--about 270 to 500 Mbps--to transmit a digitized 525 × 60 or 625-line × 50-Hz standard signal. Makers of broadcasting equipment use digital compression to reduce the required bandwidth, but the additional circuitry makes the equipment too bulky for news-gathering.

Compression schemes take advantage of the relatively small portion of an image that changes from one TV frame to the next. They save bandwidth and power by encoding and transmitting the portion that changes, instead of the whole picture, and decoding the portion at the receiver. There is very little change in news material and somewhat more in entertainment. The fastest changes are in sports, especially basketball, hockey, and soccer; both the action and the camera move quickly and in all directions.

Less than a year ago, in September 1993, the World Broadcasting Union's (WBU) DSNG Committee issued a report stating the need for affordable, high-performance, compact, and rugged equipment that small vehicles and fly-away terminals could carry. According to Dunford, the Committee expected manufacturers to take two years to come up with the desired equipment. But the solution already existed; Tadiran had developed it for Israel's RPVs. Dunford knew about the solution, and STS was able to address the WBU's need in 90 days.

The ISO's MPEG-2 standards for compressed digital TV signals specify the bit error rate in transmission as 10 ¹⁰. The standards recommend Viterbi (for block noise) and Reed-Solomon (for burst noise) error correction to achieve this error rate. As it happened, says Ovadiah Cohen, a Tadiran manager involved in conversion of military technology, his company had implemented the very same codes a few years earlier for the RPV cameras, using a chip set by C₃Microsystems. But these codes protect only against poor transmission and reception. A more serious problem in the military application, the camera's often-jerky motion, required a second level of error correction. Tadiran solved this problem by combining proprietary software and DSPs; it developed a spatial error-correction code that compensates for motion across a wide range of transmission conditions. This code en- hances the standard discrete-cosine-transform algorithm used in TV broadcasting to aid the human brain in resolving TV images.

The result is a compact exciter that maintains video resolution of 480×720-pixel (NTSC) and 576×720-pixel (PAL) at data rates from 2 to 8 Mbps. There is no "graceful degradation" in digital-TV transmission, says Dunford; if the equipment cannot maintain video resolution, the signal is lost. Therefore, the design paid particular attention to producing a robust signal throughout the many processing steps--analog-to-digital conversion, encoding, and modulation. The resulting signal, 10 dBm at 2 Mbps, requires only a 50W output amplifier, a big improvement over the 300W power amplifier needed for analog transmission.

A smaller, lighter, lower cost transmitter would be welcome, says Mike Hurt, director of American Broadcasting Co's satellite-TV communications, who hasn't seen the new STS products. The space it would save in SNG trucks isn't a big factor, he cautions, because these trucks must carry technicians and heavy tape-editing equipment. So far, he adds, "we haven't seen any digital system cheap enough and good enough to replace the analog." Dunford trusts his new exciter and receiver are meeting both conditions and that the savings in bandwidth and in transponder resources will be worth the switch to DSNG.

One of the largest electronics companies in Israel, Tadiran has been working for the past four years with US companies in harvesting its huge portfolio of clever solutions developed for defense. A well-known example is the base stations and car units it makes for the Pacific Telesis TeleTrack vehicle-identification and -location system for urban areas, which operates in Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, and several other cities. This system, based on a directional locator for military vehicles, operates on triangulation and spread-spectrum technique. L-band transmission uses dozens of high-altitude antennae, resembling a terrestrial global positioning system (GPS). Tadiran has now perfected a system for automatic toll collection at full highway speed. It comprises high-frequency antennae and readers for the toll gates and smart cards for the cars. The system can identify the correct toll and vehicle for vehicles traveling as fast as 100 mph.

A solid-state hard disk

The "M" in M-Systems used to stand for "military." The Israeli company has now added "Flash Disk Pioneers" to its name, after its main developments, a flash memory that emulates a hard disk, and PCMCIA flash-memory cards. The advantages of semiconductor flash memory over its solid-state predecessors--RAMs, ROMs, EPROMs, and EEPROMs--are simplicity (thus, potentially lower cost) and nonvolatility. The application for flash emulation of hard disks is still mostly military. Helicopters and tanks, for example, are too harsh an environment for the delicate rotating mechanisms of a magnetic hard disk.

For this application, M-Systems developed software called TrueFFS (flash file system), which emulates a hard disk and removes some of the limitations of earlier FFS. M-Systems uses this architecture in the flash-memory boards that the company supplies to Miltope of Melville, NY. IBM's (now Loral's) Federal Systems Division has selected Miltope to supply flash-memory disks for the weapon system that Loral is building for the US Navy's LAMPS MK III. Miltope makes military and industrial flash disks storing up to 230 Mbytes. A military-grade 80-Mbyte disk, for example, lists for $28,000.

Flash memory is still too expensive to compete with high-capacity disks outside the military market. Still, there are industrial and embedded applications, particularly for PCMCIA memory cards, which need the ruggedness of flash memory but require less than 10 Mbytes. Since manufacturers no longer make mechanical hard disks at such small capacities, flash replacements are becoming affordable, even though their cost per bit is still high.

Maxtor sells a line of flash PCMCIA cards with capacities up to 20 Mbytes, which the company developed with M-Systems. The 8-Mbyte card lists for $581, slightly more than a 105-Mbyte PCMCIA hard drive. The companies are aiming these cards at mobile, low-power computer applications. Prices for flash memory will go down with the cost of flash chips, says Rod Watkins, industry analyst at market research company Dataquest. He reasons that, in the long run, the inherent materials cost of flash PCMCIA cards--chips and printed card--will be lower than that of the spindle motor, rotary drive, and magnetic head of hard disks. In the meantime, flash PCMCIA cards must also bear the extra cost from the software to emulate or mask the organization of magnetic disks, as well as to compensate for some of the electrical problems of flash-storage cells.

Cheap bit talk by satellite

You can see them atop the roof of any Rite Aid drug store. The small antennae stare silently at a fixed point in the sky with their 3- to 6-ft white dishes, as they send and receive bursts of data inexpensively over the Ku band. The US' largest drugstore chain uses GTE Spacenet's "Skystar Advantage" satellite-communications service to relay data from its millions of data transactions--from inquiries and inventory to point of sale and prices--between its data-processing hub and thousands of stores across the country, at a cost lower than possible with leased telephone lines. GTE Spacenet, for its part, can better use its satellite links and provide more value-added services to customers such as Rite Aid, thanks to Ku-band VSATs made by Gilat Communication Systems of Israel. The satellite is in a geostationary orbit, giving the antennae a line of sight to the satellite. The hub antenna can adjust to minor changes in the satellite's position, and the small antennae at the branches rely on a slightly broader beam.

Because there is plenty of channel capacity in geostationary satellites, GTE Spacenet is now trying to increase the amount of data it transmits and the services it provides to its customers. The Gilat terminals, which incorporate low-noise communications equipment operating in the Ku band (10.95 to 12.75 GHz), data processing, and storage, become important components in implementing GTE's strategy.

Unlike other cases of conversion described here, VSATs were developed neither in Israel nor for a military application. They were developed in the United States to provide communications to remote Alaskan villages. Israeli engineers have contributed their expertise in spread-spectrum techniques and software. Spread spectrum is an information-science technology used in military communications to render a secure transmission insensitive to enemy or atmospheric interference; in the Rite Aid application, it minimizes interference from adjacent antennae. Gilat's software optimized the data equipment for transaction processing, which typically comprises short, discrete bursts of data. This software includes network management, protocol conversion, and diagnostics.

Last month, GE American Communications agreed to purchase Spacenet from GTE. "The purchase will establish Americom in the fast-growing VSAT business," says Chairman and CEO John F Connelly. "We are impressed by Gilat's familiarity with--and contribution to--Spacenet's VSAT business."