Secure platform for safety-critical railway applications

Kontron brings to the cooperation its proven COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) hardware, which is already used in many railway systems and has been certified up to SIL-4, the highest level of the IEC 61508 standard for functional safety of electronic systems. The SAFe-VX Kontron hardware platform will run under SYSGO's real-time operating system PikeOS, which is already used in EN 50128/SIL-4 certified systems, on both single and multi-core architectures.

Additionally, PikeOS is the only real-time operating system with separation kernel certified to EAL 3+ Common Criteria security standard to fulfil functional safety as well as security requirements on the same system. Several railway application developers are already using PikeOS on the robust and proven Kontron hardware.

“With our cooperation and the joint development of an integrated platform, we want to enable our customers to accelerate the development of their systems and significantly reduce the effort for certification,” said Robert Negre, VP of Business Development at Kontron for the railway market segment. Both Kontron and SYSGO offer certification kits with detailed product documentation.

Kontron and SYSGO have already identified several opportunities for autonomous train driving and rail signalling applications, where SAFe-VX vital processing platform is a perfect match.

Markus Jastroch, Director Marketing Communication at SYSGO, added: “Both Kontron and SYSGO have extensive experience with safety-critical and certifiable systems for the railway market. With our common platform, we offer developers the basis that meets the most stringent functional safety and embedded security requirements.”