Wind River Blog Network

Northrop Grumman X-47B UCAS-D Running on Wind River VxWorks Catapults from Aircraft Carrier

By Chip Downing

Today, the Northrop Grumman X-47B unmanned aircraft achieved a successful catapult launch from the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush carrier, the first of its kind in aviation history.  This marks a very proud day for Wind River knowing that our VxWorks real-time operating system is a key technology for this aircraft, developed as part of the Navy’s Unmanned Combat Air System Carrier Demonstration (UCAS-D) program.

Northrop Grumman's X-47B is a tailless, strike fighter-sized unmanned aircraft currently under development for carrier operations. VxWorks serves as the foundation for the Common Core System, the backbone of UCAS-D computers, networks, and interfacing electronics on the X-47B. Built on VxWorks, Northrop Grumman engineers were able to rapidly create, deploy and maintain the safety-critical control system. 

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Avionics Europe 2013 Conference

By Paul Parkinson

Last week I attended the Avionics Europe 2013 conference, which was held in Munich for the last time perhaps (as it is moving to Abu Dhabi in 2014).

The theme of this year's conference was 'Tackling the Challenges in Avionics: Single Sky Many Platforms,' which continued to focus on the growth in air traffic across Europe and challenges arising for air traffic management and navigation. However, rather than continuing to focus on the regulatory challenges as in 2012 (which I have discussed previously), there was a shift in emphasis towards the implementation of technologies such as SESAR.

One of the keynote speakers, Captain Sascha Unterbarnscheidt, A320 Captain and Director Operations Support, Lufthansa Germany made some very interesting observations in his address 'Single European Sky - Delivery to Daily Operations.' In particular, how the fragmented European air space (compared to the United States), led to ATM inefficiencies in 2011 resulting in 17.9m minutes of ATM delays, 8.1m tonnes of wasted CO2, and increased costs of around 5billion Euros (with the effect on passengers of delayed flights, longer flight times, wasted fuel and increased noise). He then went on to explain how the increased levels of automation and productivity through SESAR would result in increased capacity, reduced costs and lower accident rates.

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The Advent of Multi-core MILS

By Paul Parkinson

It has been a rather long time since my previous blog post. I intended to post a blog before the holidays regarding our partner Curtiss-Wright's announcement about VxWorks MILS support on the VPX6-187, but I simply ran out of time! So here it is as my first blog post of 2013.

The Curtiss-Wright new release was actually quite a game changer. To the casual reader, it may just appear to be about the release of another board support package (BSP) on a leading-edge COTS processor card, but the fact that this BSP supports multi-core for a MILS architecture is what makes this announcement so significant.

When the MILS software architecture was proposed in 1984 by the computer scientist Dr. John Rushby, microprocessors at the time were inherently single-core, and computing performance advances were being driven by clock speed increases and die size, at a rate following Moore's Law.

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Medical Device Security

By Jeff Fortin

A recent study published by GAO caused quite a bit of uproar over medical device security. The GAO declared in its report [read more] that the FDA has not put enough oversight in the premarket approval (PMA) of certain medical devices that are susceptible to threats. In the report the GEO referred to an experiment described in the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The experiment was conducted by a number of experts in security, medicine and engineering. They demonstrated the potential for a hacker to expose patient information as well as interfere with the correct operation of a medical device. The FDA has agreed to the GAOs insights – however pointed out that there have been no real world threats that have been reported to date.  According to the FDA, it did consider unintentional threats for information security, but did not consider information security risks from intentional threats until recently. In summary, the HHS – governing body for the FDA, concurred with the GAO recommendations and have initiated activity in this direction.  Medical device manufacturers must take the threat of security seriously.

Of all medical devices, devices that are implantable, portable or used in a home health scenario represent a growing concern for security and information privacy. I refer to these classes of devices as embedded medical devices. Developers and manufacturers of embedded medical devices are increasingly exposed to security risks as these devices become more complex and also connected to open networks. The good news is that in responding to this threat they need not operate in a vacuum nor do they need to re-invent the wheel. Best practices exist in other industries that can be leveraged by medical device manufactures. Of them the most straightforward is to design your products with security in mind. In other word, design for security. Here are a few things to think about when you design your medical devices.

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The New FACE of Avionics

By Chip Downing

Earlier this year, Wind River announced its support of the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) technical standard, which hopes to resolve two fundamental problems with military procurements.

First, current aviation systems are typically developed for a unique set of requirements by a single vendor for a single aircraft, resulting in limited portability of software components, increased costs, and creating barriers to competition within and across airborne systems.

Second, the military aviation community has not created standardized architectural and software interface standards to sufficiently enable portability of software components across DoD aviation systems.  Commercial aerospace suppliers have standardized on open common core platforms based upon ARINC 653, which is a standard API for integrated modular avionics (IMA), but this has simply not occurred in military avionics systems.

The FACE technical standard will create an open, modular, multi-vendor software environment enabling portability and reuse of software components across multiple programs and platforms.  Combining this technical standard with a the FACE Business Guide will expand the selection options for military software components, reduce up-front procurement costs, reduce system integration cost and risk, and reduce upgrade and technical refresh costs.

To read the full blog post visit Military Embedded Systems

What is the Real Impact of DO-178C and ED-12C?

By Joe Wlad

DO-178C and ED-12C are now released.  What does this mean for Wind River and its customers?

Now that RCTA DO-178 and its European equivalent, EUROCAE ED-12, have been updated after nearly twenty years, many are wondering, what is the impact to Wind River and our customers?  We’ve provided our customers with products and services based on DO-178B and ED-12B guidelines for over 10 years and have deployed certified VxWorks solutions on over 250 aircraft programs.  With the arrival of DO-178C and ED-12C it’s really business as usual for Wind River and we will incrementally adopt the standard in our future certification evidence offerings. Yes, the new release of DO-178 and ED-12 compel many to ask questions about how we comply, what our roadmap for approval is, and how we plan to support our customers now and in the future.

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Avionics Europe 2012 Report

By Paul Parkinson

I've just got back from the Avionics Europe 2012 conference and exhibition which was held in Munich.

The theme of this year's conference was 'Common Sky: Operating in One Air Space' focussing on the growth in air traffic across Europe, the challenges arising for air traffic management and navigation, and the development of SESAR air traffic management technologies.

I was keen to hear to how changes to the high-level policies would drive regulatory changes and drive technology requirements.

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Avionics 2012 Conference

By Paul Parkinson

It's been a long time since my previous blog, as unfortunately I've been engrossed in a number of projects!

However, I have just got time to mention that I'm really looking forward to the Avionics Europe conference in Munich on 21-22 March. The conference programme is pretty packed, covering cockpit avionics and technologies for civil and military aircraft; and aircraft, spacecraft and UAV sensor payloads, diagnostics and certification.

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IEC 62304, EN 62304...Confused?

 By Nikhil Chauhan

The requirements of IEC 62304 and EN 62304 are identical.  Both, IEC 62304 and EN 62304, share the same genealogy and are well recognized software life cycle standards. The only difference is that they are promoted by two different standardization bodies. IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and CENELEC adopted the same standard concurrently.

IEC 62304 is a worldwide recognized standard from IEC that defines the life cycle requirements for medical device software. The set of processes, activities, and tasks described in this standard establishes a common framework for medical device software life cycle processes.

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VxWorks Cert Now Supports ARM!

By Alex Wilson

Aerospace and defense has relied on rugged embedded vehicle mounted computers for many years, but as devices become more mobile, and with increased demand to reduce SWaP (Size, Weight, and Power), ARM-based computers become an interesting alternative.  Added to that is the wealth of functionality available in ARM devices that make it a good choice, not only to reduce SWaP in the core CPU, but to reduce overall chipset sizes to a single SoC.

If we look at an example of an ARM-based device, such as the TI OMAP3530, this is a perfect device with which to build a software defined radio for example. It has a high performance, low powered Cortex A8 Core, with numerous IO devices to help connectivity and display.  Designed as a mobile device, for example, it supports Android -- and the OMAP3530 is also well suited to other areas of A&D such as soldier mounted systems, or remote sensors.

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Wind River Discusses Security and Safety Offerings with ICC Media

By Amanda Lowe

At IPC/SPS/Drives in November, Alexander Damisch, Wind River's Director, Industrial Solutions, sat down for an interview with ICC Media to discuss our recent collaborations with Wurldtech and ISaGRAF. 

Click on the video link below to learn more about the latest offerings. 

 

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Hacking Insulin Pumps for Fun and Profit

By Ido Sarig

Last month, I had the opportunity to take part in the Amphion Medical Forum in Minneapolis, where the theme was security challenges facing Medical devices. Amphion is a forum that brings together thought leaders from academia, business, government and technology, which was founded to provide a medium for these visionaries to define solutions to some of the issues, such as safety and security, which affect the new interconnected economy, the “internet of things”.

I participated in a panel that discussed the challenges and risks posted by the latest generation of wireless medical devices, and how proper Fuzz Testing, such as the capability offered by Wind River Test Management in conjunction with our partner Codenomicon, can help alleviate some of that risk.

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SPS/IPC/Drives, Security and Safety

By Alexander Damisch

The annual SPS/IPC/Drives event was held in Nuremberg last week, this event brings together the global leaders in automation space, including Bachmann, KW Software, ABB, Siemens, Rockwell, Yaskawa and Schneider Electric to name a few! Some key themes emanating at the event included: innovation, energy efficiency, machine-to-machine, security and safety.

Wind River made several exciting announcements at this year’s faire.

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