Green Hills' software awarded DO-178B Level A Certification

The operating system functionality selected by CMC for DO-178B Level A certification includes capabilities required to host applications that align with the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Technical Standard. This includes integration of existing Green Hills Software DO-178B Level A Partitioning-Journaling File System (PJFS-178B) and IPFLITE Ethernet stacks as part of their tuMP-based multicore system. The CMC systems will be capable of hosting FACE Technical Standard aligned applications developed using C, C++, and Ada95 programming languages.

“For CMC, a key attribute of successful product development, long term maintenance and customer satisfaction is sufficient processing capabilities,” said Patrick Champagne, vice president, Cockpits and Systems Integration, Esterline CMC Electronics. “Continuation of this level of processing support without escalating the required power and subsequent heat dissipation requires the use of multicore processors whose composite processing capabilities across multiple cores are greater than a single-core processor with the same power load. CMC determined that Green Hills Software’s INTEGRITY-178B tuMP product uniquely provides the partitioning, resource configuration, and certification support required for our next generation of avionics products. The tuMP architecture and layered products provide the capabilities necessary to support FACE Technical Standard aligned applications, yet also provide the flexibility to tailor a system for other types of end-users.”

“Green Hills Software has a long history as an innovative leader in enabling real-time embedded system designers, such as Esterline CMC Electronics, to fully utilize the available microprocessor features,” said Dan O'Dowd, founder and chief executive officer of Green Hills Software. “From pioneering efforts of real-time embedded support for robust partitioning for single-core processors, this history continues with today’s highly capable multicore processors. Green Hills Software is pleased with CMC’s selection of the INTEGRITY-178B tuMP real-time operating system (RTOS) as the basis for their next-generation DO-178B Level A avionics product line. This selection will provide CMC with leading-edge multicore processing capabilities that are appropriate for their safety-based designs.”

Green Hills Software's INTEGRITY-178B tuMP multicore operating system builds upon a proven twelve-year service history and certification pedigree by incorporating multicore operating system capabilities. Certification of multicore-based operating systems requires an architecture that provides sufficient scheduling control over the cores and applications necessary to resolve potential interference within the shared resources, yet also scheduling flexibility so that the multiple cores can be effectively utilized. tuMP supports associations of cores and applications referred to as affinity groups, which can be used to create multiple SMP and AMP scheduling relationships, that in turn can be assigned partition time windows in support of robust partitioning. This high degree of scheduling control permitted by tuMP, coupled with its support for SMP and AMP scheduling, provides the control and flexibility capable of resolving potential resource interference issues.