Military Embedded Systems

Esterline CMC Electronics selects INTEGRITY-178B tuMP Multicore OS from Green Hills Software for DO-178B certification

News

April 03, 2013

John McHale

Editorial Director

Military Embedded Systems

DAYTON, OH. Engineers at Esterline CMC Electronics (CMC) selected Green Hills Software engineers to provide a DO-178B Level A-compliant multicore real-time operating system (RTOS) for CMC's next generation of integrated avionics computers and smart displays. For this application the INTEGRITY-178B Time-Variant Unified Multi Processing (tuMP) capabilities from Green Hills Software will be hosted on a Freescale multicore processor. Green Hills made the announcement this week at the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Consortium's Air Force Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) at Wight-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH.

The functionality CMC selected for DO-178B Level A certification also includes capabilities required to host applications that align with the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical Standard -- developed by the FACE Consortium. This includes integration of existing Green Hills Software DO-178B Level A Partitioning-Journaling File System (PJFS-178B) and IPFLITE Ethernet stacks for their tuMP-based multicore system. The CMC systems also will be capable of hosting FACE Technical Standard aligned applications developed using C, C++, and Ada95 programming languages.

“For CMC, a key attribute of successful product development, long term maintenance and customer satisfaction is sufficient processing capabilities,” says Patrick Champagne, vice president, Cockpits and Systems Integration, Esterline CMC Electronics. “Continuation of this level of processing support without escalating the required power and subsequent heat dissipation requires the use of multicore processors whose composite processing capabilities across multiple cores are greater than a single-core processor with the same power load. CMC determined that Green Hills Software’s INTEGRITY-178B tuMP product uniquely provides the partitioning, resource configuration, and certification support required for our next generation of avionics products. The tuMP architecture and layered products provide the capabilities necessary to support FACE Technical Standard aligned applications, yet also provide the flexibility to tailor a system for other types of end-users.”

Certification of multicore-based operating systems requires an architecture that enables sufficient scheduling control over the cores and applications that are necessary to resolve potential interference within the shared resources. It also enables scheduling flexibility so the multiple cores can be effectively used. tuMP supports associations of cores and applications referred to as affinity groups, that can be used to create multiple SMP and AMP scheduling relationships, which in turn can be assigned partition time windows in support of robust partitioning. This high degree of scheduling control permitted by tuMP, coupled with its support for SMP and AMP scheduling, provides the control and flexibility capable of resolving potential resource interference issues, according to Green Hills.

For more information, phone 1-800-789-9695 or +1-727-781-4909, email [email protected], or visit www.ghs.com.

 

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