MAINZ, Germany, 3 Nov. 2009 SYSGO ported their Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) pre-approved implementation of software based AFDX (ARINC-664) solution combined with their flag-ship product PikeOS real-time operating system (RTOS) on the dual-core PowerQUICC III MPC8572E device from Freescale. The first application using this solution has safety-critical requirements, SYSGO officials say.
Currently developed for avionics applications but adaptable to other industry sectors, SYSGO officials say.
"We see a growing interest for our software based implementation of AFDX, "says Michael Tiedemann, chief executive officer of SYSGO. "The combination with our DO-178B certifiable and SMP compliant operating system PikeOS and the efficient dual-core PowerQUICC III hardware platform makes it even more attractive."
Freescale's high-performance MPC8572 PowerQUICC III integrated communications processor is designed to provide solutions for symmetrical and asymmetrical multi-core systems. Based on the scalable e500 processor and system-on-chip (SoC) platform, the device delivers dual-core gigahertz plus processing performance with advanced content processing and security features.
The combined solution can be used in different cases requiring the use a dual core device for higher performance with symmetric multiprocessor (SMP). Those cases include: to collapse two non-SMP operation systems (either homogenous or heterogeneous) onto one device; for split control and data plane applications; for adding services/applications on Linux next to an existing operating system; for later in-field upgrade to higher performance by turning on the second core; for in-field "hot swap" operating system upgrade by loading the new operating systems to second core before putting first core with the old operating system into sleep mode.
The combined solution of Portable AFDX and PikeOS 3.0 on PowerQUICC III MPC8572E is available this month.
Avionic Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX/ARINC-664) is a specification of a deterministic aircraft data network bus system for public (but not only) avionics transportation. The network is based on standard 802.3 Ethernet technology components to reduce the overall costs for the aircraft network. AFDX extends the standard Ethernet by adding Quality of Service (QoS) and deterministic behavior with a guaranteed dedicated bandwidth.
PikeOS provides an embedded systems platform where multiple virtual machines can run simultaneously in a secure environment. The Safe and Secure Virtualization (SSV) technology allows multiple operating system APIs, called to run concurrently on one machine, e.g. an ARINC-653 application together with Linux. The PikeOS microkernel architecture allows it to be used in cost sensitive, resource constrained devices as well as large, complex systems.
