SYSGO Expands DO-178B Certified PikeOS to IEC61508 and EN50128 Safety Standards

SYSGO built its safety certification expertise mainly in the avionics area, where the DO-178B standard is required. Because of a growing demand coming from other industrial sectors such as industrial automation, ground transportation, medical and automotive, SYSGO is making its Safe and Secure Virtualization (SSV) RTOS PikeOS available for these industry sectors with the same highest level of safety and security.

The IEC 61508 standard is the basis of many derived standards used in a variety of industries for which safety and reliability are critical. It was released in 1998 by the International Electrotechnical Commission and renewed in 2010. The document includes seven parts, where part 3 defines the software requirements of Functional safety of electrical / electronic / programmable electronic safety-related systems. IEC 61508 distinguishes four Safety Integrity Levels (SIL) according to the probability of failures and their potential damage. SYSGO will address all four levels.

PikeOS has been designed for use in safety-critical applications and has gone through internal initial compliancy validation according to safety standards like DO-178B, EN 50128, IEC 62304, IEC 61508, ISO 26262, IEC 61513 for the avionics, automotive, railway, medical, industrial automation or nuclear power sectors. Since only the micro-kernel runs in privileged mode, all of its code contributes to the trusted code base of every application that might run on top of it. Besides the ability brought by virtualization to decrease the hardware bill of materials, an important source of cost reduction comes from the capacity of PikeOS to allow the co-existence of applications of different criticality levels on a single hardware platform, where each application can be certified independently.

“We have put in place an aggressive plan to finalize the IEC 61508 and EN50128 certification of our PikeOS flagship product,” said Michael Tiedemann, CEO of SYSGO. “Our successes in the avionics market such as our participation in the A400M and A350 XWB, requiring DO-178B certification, helped us in defining a very portable and generic core technology. As a result, the same PikeOS kernel can be used for other industries which can also benefit from the design and features guaranteeing the highest level of safety and security.”