New-Tech Europe | December 2016 | Didital Edition

Fig: ARINC 653 compliant OS architecture

iii) The historical dominance of PowerPC in the embedded market appears to be somewhat in decline, and the long term future appears to be uncertain with NXP (formerly Freescale) developing ARM-based processors as well as to PowerPC. In addition, the large number of PowerPC QorIQ processor architecture variants makes it unclear if there will be a de facto choice for avionics. iv) The increasing performance of ARM-based processors means that they may be considered as a viable option for some types of avionics application where PowerPC processors had been used previously. v) Intel processors which historically were not widely considered for use in avionics applications due in part to their power dissipation requirements are now being considered due to Intel’s low-power 14nm processor devices [3]. These market dynamics have resulted

For these reasons, DO-178B and ED- 12B Level A COTS RTOS certification evidence packages have been developed for the most widely-used single-core processors in avionics. Wind River has used a COTS evidence approach for the VxWorks RTOS which has enabled the significant DO-178 and ED-12 certification NRE costs to be amortised across multiple customers and programmes using the same processor architecture, reducing the cost of certification on each programme. This also results in a virtuous circle, as these processors have provided the lowest cost options for follow-on certification projects, due to the ability to reuse existing DO- 178 and ED-12 certification evidence, rather than having to develop it for a new processor architecture and associated incremental costs. The Challenge of Multi- core Certification

in fragmentation of processor selection for avionics, resulting in a lack of an obvious, single successor for widely-deployed PowerPC single core processors. We are now facing a wide range of contenders in terms of ARM multi-core, PowerPC QorIQ architecture families and Intel Core and Atom architectures. The Challenge of RTOS Safety Certification Undertaking DO-178B and ED-12B Level A software certification of an RTOS is extremely expensive, costing millions of Euros and is specific to an underlying processor architecture. It is cost-prohibitive COTS real-time operating system (RTOS) suppliers to undertake DO-178B and ED-12B safety certification on many different processor architectures, with no guarantee of being able to recoup the non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs.

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