I’m certain that there were some project managers in the early 1990s who were hesitant to design with PC/104. “We’ll stick to the older, proven specifications, thank you very much.” Thankfully, there were plenty of early adopters – engineers and designers who saw the value of a stackable architecture, the elimination of the backplane, and the potential for a multivendor ecosystem of compatible products.

Two international teams of security researchers have independently and concurrently discovered “Foreshadow,” a new variant of the hardware vulnerability known as “Meltdown,” which exploits a bypass of Intel processors’ secure regions to access memory and data.

PC/104, well into its fourth decade, remains strong globally in markets such as aerospace, defense, industrial, and medical. Such longevity is a tribute to its inherent ruggedness and the open architecture that enables PC/104 designers to continually integrate state-of-the-art processing technology from companies such as Intel and Arm.

Reduced size, weight, and power (SWaP) and increased standardization requirements for applications from unmanned aircraft to ground vehicles to portable communications systems are driving military power supply designs.

Reliability and performance still matter for industrial embedded computing applications, which is why the PC/104 standard remains the first choice for those solutions requiring small form factors that can operate reliably in harsh industrial environments. 

Raytheon is sending a one-of-a-kind small satellite to low Earth orbit to do a proof of concept of a prototype design - originally developed for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) - to provide useful imagery directly to military users in the field.

Electrical interfaces and connectors today face signal integrity challenges which weren't a real concern 10 to 15 years ago. This is especially true for military systems such as radar, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) that continue to grow in complexity.