Wind River Alex Wilson: Integrated modularity is the development direction of avionics systems

[51CTO.com original article] At the just concluded 7th International Forum on Civil Aircraft Avionics, Mr. Alex Wilson, Director of Business Development for the Aviation and Defense Industry at Wind River Systems, a leading global provider of intelligent interconnected system software, delivered a keynote speech. After the forum, 51CTO had the honor of interviewing Mr. Alex Wilson and had an in-depth discussion on hot topics such as the mainstream development trend of the future aviation industry and Wind River's latest achievements in avionics systems.

Mr. Alex Wilson from Wind River UK has many years of R&D and operation experience in aviation electronic control systems. Before joining Wind River, he worked for British Aerospace and Motorola Computer Division, responsible for the development of automated testing and real-time operating systems. After joining Wind River in 1996, he worked as a field application engineer, responsible for supporting VxWorks and Tornado. In 2002, Alex worked as the European Business Development Manager of Wind River, engaged in aerospace and defense market development. In the interview, as a senior aviation electronic control expert, he not only shared with us the development of mainstream avionics systems, but also fully affirmed China's achievements in the development of aviation.

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Main Trends of Future Aviation Industry

Alex believes that the overall development trend of the aviation industry is that aircraft and the equipment of the entire aviation industry will become more intelligent. The equipment and network inside the aircraft must take care of the safety and comfort of passengers. The data communication between the aircraft and the ground must help aviation companies improve efficiency and reduce costs, and also serve the enforcement of regulations by aviation management agencies. From the demand perspective, passengers have more and more requirements for onboard functions, which are becoming more and more professional, which will bring pressure on cost efficiency. At the same time, the challenges faced by aviation system safety are becoming more severe.

The development trend at the technical level is electronicization and softwareization, so as to reduce the size, weight and power consumption of airborne equipment while increasing functionality and improving safety. From the perspective of the industrial chain, we will usher in more and more global procurement and cooperation, national boundaries will be broken more frequently, and the forms of competition and cooperation between countries will become more diversified.

From federated to modular

Talking about specific business, Alex admitted that integrated modularization is the development direction of avionics control systems. Traditional joint avionics systems are equipped with independent computer control systems in different parts of the aircraft, while integrated modular systems centralize these independent systems and implement them with fewer computers, thereby reducing the space and power consumption of computer control equipment. At the same time, because more functions are implemented through software instead of dedicated hardware as in the past, the update cycle of various functions is accelerated and the adaptability is improved.

Due to the demand for diversified functions, more systems need to be connected to undertake more functions in a smaller space with lighter weight and lower power consumption. This is the so-called SWaP (Space, Weight, and Power). It also includes a significant reduction in cabin wiring, so hardware consolidation is needed.

The performance of a single-core processor is completely limited by the clock frequency. The maturity and popularity of multi-core processors have laid the foundation for hardware centralization, which can run more software on fewer processors, but resource sharing will bring great challenges to security. Research on multi-core processor architecture has revealed many problems that were not encountered when designing avionics systems for single-core processors. This problem can basically be summarized into three aspects: first, the difficulty of system integration is greater; second, the complexity of design and certification is higher; third, the experience in the industry supply chain is not rich enough and needs further accumulation.

Wind River Sets New Standard for Avionics System Security

From the beginning, Wind River has created and inherited a large number of certified platform assets and used them as standard COTS platforms, providing rich functions and great flexibility for future integrated modular avionics systems. As early as 2000, Wind River released the first certifiable platform, VxWorks Cert 5.4, which is used for safety-critical DO-178B and 61508. After nearly 20 years of development, Wind River continues to bring new features to its safety and reliability product portfolio.

It can be said that VxWorks 653 has been driving the evolution of industry standards and promoting the formation of a broad ecosystem among customers, partners and avionics suppliers. It supports the coexistence of safety and non-safety application software with a single operating system. Sharing the same hardware platform with isolation in time and space is a unique technical capability in the industry.

Since its launch, VxWorks 653 has been used as the technology for many manned and unmanned commercial, space, security and mission-critical projects around the world. It has been successfully used in many key projects, including Airbus and Boeing commercial and military aircraft, such as the Airbus A400M and Boeing 787, NASA space vehicles and advanced automated vehicles.

The greatest value of VxWorks 653 is that it enables the rapid integration of products from multiple application software providers, sharing the same IMA computing platform, and organically integrating multiple suppliers and the role-based supply chain standard RTCA DO-297. With robust partitioning, coupled with development and verification tools that meet RTCA DO-330 quality requirements, VxWorks 653 allows system components to be updated independently without the need for comprehensive testing of the entire system. These capabilities and qualities save customers a large amount of testing and certification work each year, worth millions of dollars, while accelerating time to market and deployment. The above capabilities have been verified in more than 400 projects in more than 80 models of civil and military aircraft.

Recently, VxWorks 653 Multi-Core Edition passed an important milestone, which is the addition of full support for Intel platforms. In the past few years, Intel multi-core hardware has become an excellent platform for many software for the aerospace and defense industry and the transportation industry, as well as similar industries that require strong computing power and have extremely high requirements for safety and reliability. VxWorks 653 Multi-Core Edition can fully utilize the CPU technology advances provided by Intel architecture while complying with the ARINC 653 specification of the Integrated Modular Avionics System (IMA).

VxWorks 653 has been driving the evolution of industry standards and fostering a broad ecosystem among customers, partners and avionics suppliers. It supports the coexistence of safety and non-safety applications with a single operating system. The ability to share the same hardware platform with isolation in time and space is unique in the industry.

2017 was a successful year for Wind River in the field of avionics systems. VxWorks 653 obtained the compatibility certification of the "Future Airborne Capability Certified Environment" and became part of the "FACE Technical Standard Operating System Domain (OSS) Security Foundation Configuration". To date, it is still the only FACE operating system that meets industry standard compatibility. Since then, Wind River has released VxWorks 653 Multi-core Edition for multi-core IMA systems, including the official version for PowerPC architecture and the initial version for Intel architecture. By the end of the year, Wind River VxWorks 653 won the Military & Aerospace Electronics Innovation Awards for the second time, which once again affirmed the value and capabilities of this industry-leading product. Let us look forward to Wind River making greater contributions to all mankind in the field of avionics.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]