BOSTON, 20 Feb. 2007 Achieving high integrity with software is crucial as the military moves more and more toward open architectures for mission critical systems. Industry experts will discuss these challenges as well as lessons learned and potential solutions to thermal problems in legacy and new military electronics applications at the Military Technologies Conference (MTC) on March 27 and 28, 2007 in Boston.
Those interested in attending the conference may register online here at https://www.pennwellregistration.com/online/Login.jsp?confId=180.
The conference module titled, "Software Implementation for Open Architectures," will cover these discussions on the second day of the conference, March 28, from 8:30 a.m. to noon. The conference is developed by Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine.
Joyce Tokar, President of Pyrrhus Software and a member of the Military Technologies Conference Advisory Council, will moderate the module. Tokar will also be giving a presentation on how military software architectures can achieve high integrity in safety critical systems.
Following Tokar will be Redge Bartholomew, engineering manager at Rockwell Collins on "Static Analysis as an Example Approach to High Integrity Open Source Software." His talk "will describe static analyzers and the requirements of DO-178B that they could address to enable the use of open-source software in the high integrity context. This will include the potential role of the static analyzer in the certification process as well as the qualification criteria that must be met before it could be used. It will describe internal experience to date, and in particular it will describe obstacles. It will describe increasingly compatible government-industry efforts in this direction, and will finish with a description of potential solutions to remaining obstacles."
Kelvin Nilsen, chief technology officer of Aonix will then give a presentation titled "Java Disciplines to Satisfy Real-time Constraints and Certification Requirements." He will discuss how in the information technology space, the Java programming language has replaced C++ as the predominant programming language, largely because Java programmers are approximately twice as productive when developing new code and are five to ten times as productive during maintenance of existing code. Various real-time Java technologies offer to extend these benefits into the domain of embedded real-time systems. This talk discusses disciplines that allow Java software to comply with important real-time and certification requirements while preserving important portability and scalability benefits of the Java programming environment."
"Why High Integrity Software Requires Open Source Tools," is the presentation of the module's last speaker, Robert Dewar, president and chief executive officer of AdaCore. The talk will look at the claim "that the use of free software/open source is incompatible with high integrity software. We will show that this is exactly wrong. By making tool chains open, we are far more likely to avoid the kind of malicious code and insecure features that can compromise the applications built using these tools. The dangers of closed proprietary code have been illustrated in recent times by the discovery of serious vulnerabilities in critical systems such as voting machine software. Keeping things secret provides a false sense of security, but in practice compromises reliability."
Following the presentations will be a question and answer session with the audience.
In addition to the panel on software implementation for open architectures MTC 2007 also has two other focused modules lead by industry leaders: Networking on the Move, which focuses on the design challenges in providing non line-of-sight communications to military units on the move, and Thermal & Power Management Trends for Military Electronics, which focuses on the latest solutions for improving power efficiency to managing thermal issues in military platforms.
Also be sure to check out the MTC Opening Session on the morning of March 27, which is highlighted by two talks on lead-free issues.
The first presentation is from Anthony J. Rafanelli, an engineering fellow at Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems and Lloyd Condra, Technical Fellow at Boeing Phantom Works on "A Protocol for Reliability Testing of Aerospace and High-Performance Lead-Free Electronic Assemblies."
William Russell of Raytheon Professional Services LLC will also present "Methodology for Evaluating Data for 'Reverse Compatibility' Solder Joints." The other authors of this paper are Dennis Fritz - SAIC, Christian Navarro � Purdue Calumet, Carol Handwerker � Purdue, Lafayette, Gary Latta � NAVSEA Crane, and Andrew Ganster � NAVSEA Crane.
The conference will be at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. For more information, please visit www.miltechconference.com.
