A real time operating system developed by Green Hills has become the avionics industry’s first multicore system to achieve the Future Airborne Capability Environment’s (FACE) 3.0 technical standard.
According to Green Hills, their INTEGRITY-178 Time-Variant Unified Multi Processing (tuMP) is the first real-time operating system to achieve FACE’s 3.0 standard. The real time system uses asymmetric multi-processing (AMP) and bound multi-processing (BMP) in a time-partitioned manner on a multicore processor.
Green Hills first started system verification and validation with an independent FACE conformance verification authority in September. The system was verified for three different multicore architectures, or units of conformance: Intel, Arm and PowerPC/QorIQ. Each unit of conformance from the INTEGRITY-178 system was verified against both the safety base and security profiles for C, C++ and Ada support.
FACE 3.0, published in November 2017, has, among other things, added system model metadata definition and introduced improvements to the data architecture area of the standard as well. The third version of the FACE standard technical standard now requires any operating system segment with support for multicore partitions to meet the requirements of ARINC-653 Part 1 Supplement 4.
The standard is published by the Open Group’s FACE Consortium, a partnership between industry suppliers, government experts and operators to provide avionics that use an open system architecture. The consortium has continually updated their standard, which integrates and builds off proven standards like OpenGL, ARINC 729 and POSIX.
A Northrop Grumman FlightPro Gen III mission computer features Green Hill’s INTEGRITY-178 RTOS.
While this is the first FACE 3.0 certification approved for the INTEGRITY-178, it is featured on boards used by Curtiss-Wright, Mercury Systems, and Extreme Engineering among others, a representative for Green Hills told Avionics International in an emailed statement.
Northrop Grumman also features the system on its third-generation FlightPro mission computer featured on avionics upgrades to in-service UH-1Y and AH-1Z helicopters. It is also featured on the Esterline CMC Electronics multi-function smart display, which was part of an avionics refresh program for the CH-53GS/GE Sea Stallion fleet operated by the Finnish Air Force.
“The ability to execute an application across a user allocated core or group of cores in a bounded and time-partitioned manner is necessary for achieving maximum performance and minimum size, weight, and power for integrated modular avionics,” Dan O’Dowd, founder and chief executive officer of Green Hills said of the new achievement.