AEROSPACE
Leveraging Open Avionics Standards to Refi ne and Accelerate
Aircraft Deployments Chip Downing, senior market development director, aerospace & defence, Real-Time Innovations, Inc. explores the importance of open standards for the development of commercial aircraft
T
he cost and risk of building commercial aircraft is immense. To help bring greater order to the process, the global commercial aerospace industry created a rich set of standards, many controlled by the ARINC standards body, that cover nearly all aspects of building and operating commercial airliners. These standards in turn create a stable market for aerospace systems developers, which immediately creates opportunities within the supply chain for greater investment and innovation. One of these standards, ARINC 653, has saved the industry billions of dollars, and continues to save manufacturers more money every day. ARINC 653 spearheaded the industry migration from federated, or standalone, avionics systems to Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) platforms. The evolution from hardware-centric to software- centric systems accelerated this transition,
32 NOVEMBER 2022 | ELECTRONICS TODAY
due to signifi cant reductions in Size, Weight, and Power and related Costs (SWAP-C). Federated compute architectures typically include an enclosure, redundant power supplies, redundant compute systems, with RTOSs, board support packages (BSPs), network/connectivity software and fi nally federated software applications. This is great for maintenance - one simply swaps out the federated box and replaces it with another. But as the volume of software applications increases on an aircraft, basing things on individual federated systems becomes untenable due to SWAP-C concerns. Enter the ARINC 653 IMA platform. This is a singular platform, typically with triple redundant processors, power supplies and network connections. There is only one Real- Time Operating System (RTOS). And most of the application software on the aircraft is hosted on a time-and-space partitioned
Figure 1: Federated avionics architecture
environment with other application software (there still may be a few federated systems on the aircraft). But this environment removes the requirements for every software component to have its own heavyweight hardware, RTOS, power and network infrastructure: Only application software is delivered to this ARINC 653 party. In modern software-centric aircraft, this IMA
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
