Safety-Critical Software Development for Integrated Modular Avionics

Embark on a transformative journey into the realm of embedded systems with our exclusive webinar. This webinar is tailored for Wind River customers, developers, system architects, and project managers seeking to enhance their understanding of the intricacies involved in embedded projects.

This technical paper presents recent trends in the development of safety- critical avionics systems. It discusses the emergence of Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architectures and standards, the resulting impact on the development of an ARINC 653–compliant commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) real-time operating system (RTOS), and support for multi-core processor architectures.

Many avionics systems have been successfully developed using custom hardware and software. However, over the last decade, the full lifecycle costs of customized systems have forced original equip- ment manufacturers (OEMs) to consider the use of COTS-based systems. At the same time, there has been a noticeable migration away from federated architectures, where each individual subsystem performs a dedicated function, toward generic computing platforms that can be used in multiple types of applications and, in some cases, can run multiple applications concurrently.