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July 2017 • The PCB Magazine 15 References 1. BGOV200 Federal Industry Leaders 2016 John Vaughan is vice president of sales and marketing at Zentech Manufacturing. To read past columns or to contact Vaughan, click here. Brian Friel is a leading federal contracts market analyst with two decades of experience analyzing the business of government. Pri- or to launching Nation Analytics, he was a senior contract analyst at Bloomberg Government, where he spearheaded IDIQ research and created the BGOV200 annual ranking of federal contractors. DEFENSE BUDGET ANALYSIS: PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE sub-tiers such as printed circuit board fabrica- tors and electronics contract manufacturers that support them) for upsides. The 2018 plus- up in the military budget will allow the servic- es to shore up existing systems and foreign mili- tary sales (FMS) will continue to be robust. Missile programs are a particular beneficiary. Modifications to missile systems will total $898 million in fiscal 2018, $267 million more than proposed last year and more than double the $418 million allocated for missile system modi- fications in fiscal 2016. Summarizing, it's time to patiently stay the course and let the budget processes unfold. Giv- en all the actors on the world stage, it appears highly doubtful peace will be breaking out any time soon. Defense will soon be calling on in- dustry to support our warfighters at accelerated levels and we need to be prepared to do our part in support of the many potential missions that are unfolding. PCB Researchers at UC Santa Barbara Profes- sor Yasamin Mostofi's lab gave the first demonstra- tion of 3D imaging of ob- jects through walls using ordinary wireless signal. The technique, which in- volves two drones work- ing in tandem, could have a variety of applications, such as emergency search-and-rescue, archaeological discovery and structural monitoring. "Our proposed approach has enabled un- manned aerial vehicles to image details through walls in 3D with only WiFi signals," said Mostofi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. "This approach utilizes only WiFi RSSI measure- ments, does not require any prior measurements and does not need objects to move." The proposed methodology and experimental results appeared in the Association for Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Informa- tion Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN). In their experiment, two autonomous oc- tocopters take off and fly outside an enclosed, four-sided brick house whose interior is un- known to the drones. While in flight, one cop- ter continuously transmits a WiFi signal, the re- ceived power of which is measured by the other copter for 3D imaging. After traversing a few proposed routes, the cop- ters utilize the imaging methodology developed by the researchers to reveal the area behind the walls and generate 3D high-resolution images of the objects inside. The 3D image closely matches the actual area. "High-resolution 3D imaging through walls, such as brick walls or concrete walls, is very chal- lenging, and the main motivation for the proposed approach," said Chitra R. Karanam, the lead Ph.D. student on the project. X-ray Eyes in the Sky