WIND RIVER AND PARTNERS DRIVE COTS AVIONICS DISPLAYS
Avionics systems suppliers using these combined COTS solutions can save up to 35% or more over the life of a DO-178B certified system
05 Mar 08. Wind River Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:WIND), the global leader in Device Software Optimization (DSO), has established a new product integration with Esterel Technologies, a leader in model-based design, verification and qualified code. The partnership will incorporate formal design and development technologies into safety-critical software for the avionics industry, which delivers advanced 3-D graphics and video displays, utilizing more data than ever before and requiring a new design process. The result is code generated from Esterel’s SCADE Suite® and SCADE Display™ targeted for Wind River’s VxWorks 653® platform, which is safety-certified to DO-178B Level A and fully conformant to ARINC 653, Supplement 2 Part 1. These combined commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions allow avionics systems suppliers to save up to 35% or more over the life of a DO-178B certified system.
Wind River’s VxWorks 653 Integrated Multiple Avionics (IMA) platform allows sophisticated display functions to be easily integrated into time- and space-partitioned systems using standard COTS platforms. Developers of displays can now focus on providing added functionality and new features rather than building a foundation from scratch to meet rigorous safety standards. Technology from Esterel gives the embedded developer the ability to efficiently design safety-critical avionics display applications targeted for the Wind River platform. The unique integration between Esterel and Wind River products includes qualified code generation, verification, and enhanced support for OpenGL SC, safety-critical graphics in the deployed system.
Once the application is designed, the code can be automatically generated in C or Ada and integrated on the Avionics Platform. AdaCore, provider of high quality Ada tools and support services, has fully integrated their Ada code, compliant to the Ada 2005 standard, into the design workflow. The Ada programming language is the language of choice in a long list of avionics projects (787, A380, 767, A330 MRTT, 777, Eurofighter, NH90 and others). The new ISO standard, Ada 2005, goes even further in providing innovative features for building safety-critical software. New restrictions and profiles allow projects to adapt their run-time to their safety-critical development, supporting deterministic scheduling and initialization, together with static source code analysis. Ada 2005 introduces flexible task-dispatching policies, execution-time clocks and timers, and a unification of concurrent and object-oriented features. These make Ada the safest choice when building programs that can’t fail.
Barco, a Wind River customer and maker of display systems for the E2-D Advanced Hawkeye, Pilatus PC-21 and Honeywell’s Primus 1000, 2000, 2000XP, SPZ-8400, 8500 and SPZ-8000 avionics systems, are taking advantage of open architecture to build open standards-based displays based on COTS design tools and OpenGL. These components enable customers to easily develop and integrate their own applications into display solutions.
Jean-Christophe Monfret, Product Management Director at Barco, explains, “Military and civil aviation customers are demanding more advanced applications that become available faster, that are cheaper and that are better integrated into the same unit. This approach enables them to reduce weight and space, improve system availability, and comply with various levels of the DO-178B software safety standard. The open architecture enabled by Wind River and its partner ecosystem allows us to meet these rigorous requirements and reduce our time to market. Certifying systems such as primary flight display, synthetic vision, enhanced vision and digital moving map for ARINC 653 requires a COTS approach to maintain a competitive edge.