Safety-certifiable 3U modules lower risk and reduce integration costs for critical avionics applications
Mercury Systems Inc. announced its new line of safety-certifiable 3U OpenVPX™ SOSA-aligned avionics modules designed to accelerate critical avionics applications and streamline subsystem development and platform safety certification.
“Designing, building, testing, and certifying flight-ready mission computers is a costly and time-consuming endeavor,” said Jay Abendroth, vice president, Mercury Mission. “System architects require open standard, safety-certifiable rugged boards to accelerate subsystem development, lower risk, and support advanced mission workloads like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and converged applications. Using Mercury’s purpose-built, proven DAL-certifiable SOSA-aligned 3U OpenVPX modules, designers can expedite the certification process while saving time and money.”
The rugged processing, video, storage, and power modules feature BuiltSAFE™ proven, modular, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) elements complete with hardware and software artifacts to deliver smooth performance and simplify integration. DO-178-certifiable developmental board support packages (BSPs) support Green Hills Software, Lynx Software Technologies, WindRiver, and other real-time operating systems (RTOS) software to streamline integration and the certification process.
“Aerospace and defense customers are looking to quickly deploy and certify subsystems with safety-critical and platform technologies,” said Pavan Singh, vice president of product management for Lynx Software Technologies. “Our decade-long partnership with Mercury enables us to dramatically accelerate time to deployment, reduce development cost, and maximize interoperability for mission-critical avionics applications.”
The SBC3515-S module included in the new product lineup is the first certifiable Intel® Core™ i7 single-board computer with the latest generation processor on the market, delivering up to 40x better performance than traditional safety-certifiable processing boards.
“Mercury has been an Intel partner for many years, providing ruggedized systems based on Intel semiconductor products to the aerospace and defense markets,” said Tony Franklin, general manager, Intel Federal, and Aerospace Group. “We are excited to grow our partnership to include the use of Intel’s high-performance multicore processors to accelerate critical avionics applications. Systems developed by Mercury with Intel hardware and the Intel Airworthiness Evidence Package can reduce development time for avionic subsystems while lowering risks and costs.”
“As the only real-time operating system to be part of a successful multicore certification to DO-178C and CAST-32A, the INTEGRITY-178® tuMP™ RTOS enables maximum utilization of the high-performance Intel cores even in mixed-criticality systems, up to and including DAL A,” said Richard Jaenicke, director of marketing for safety and security-critical products at Green Hills Software. “Our collaboration with Mercury Systems enables system integrators to develop, certify, and deploy multicore avionics systems with the lowest risk, lowest overall cost, and fastest time to deployment.”