Two Wind River Enhancements Help Customers Achieve Industry Certifications

In safety-critical industries, organizations must demonstrate that their systems protect people, property, and the operating environment. The path to certification for functional safety can be demanding and expensive, and usually requires specialized knowledge.  However, it’s not optional. Plus, certification builds credibility and provides a competitive edge.

Wind River has two recent product enhancements to support certification efforts in the context of intelligent-edge products:

• Extended processor coverage for the industrial functional safety standard IEC 61508
• For aerospace and defense (A&D) scenarios, we now support two new hardware products, aligned to Intel AEP for airworthiness certification

At Wind River, enabling our customers to achieve cost-effective functional safety certification is a cornerstone of our VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) and our Wind River Helix Virtualization Platform (hypervisor). 

When customers develop software applications to run on Helix Platform or our safety-certified VxWorks Cert Edition, they need only certify the code their organization develops. In some cases, that code is part of a complex, wider system certification project, such as an airframe. Getting the approvals can require certification evidence from our end, which we offer.

One reason why VxWorks holds the top ranking in edge operating system platforms is its breadth of deployment, which is underpinned by certifications spanning multiple industries. We hold RTCA DO-178C​ (EUROCAE ED-12C) DAL A for aerospace and defense (A&D), ​IEC 61508 SIL 3 for industrial, ​ISO 26262 ASIL-D for automotive​, and IEC 62304 Class C for medical. Helix Platform holds the same A&D, automotive, and industrial certifications. Thus, VxWorks and Helix Platform minimize project risk and offer assurance on the software foundation.

Extending IEC 61508 SIL 3 Support for Industrial Applications

Although Wind River has held a IEC 61508 SIL 3 certification since 2018, we recently increased our VxWorks support to cover the Arm Cortex-A53 processor, which uses the Armv8-A 64-bit architecture.

A popular choice for industrial use cases, due to its balance of performance, power efficiency, and cost, the Arm Cortex-A53 processor is often deployed in quad-core configurations. It is used in scenarios that benefit from multi-threaded workloads, including industrial human-machine interface (HMI), edge processing, and data acquisition. SoC integrations often include I/O interfaces important for industrial automation, such as CAN, SPI, I2C, UART, and Ethernet. With safety-certified VxWorks as the software foundation, our industrial customers can achieve a highly competitive time-to-certification for their applications.

Aligning with the Intel Airworthiness Evidence Package (AEP)

Intel AEP refers to non-public information that Intel provides to support the certification of its hardware and software for use in safety-critical aerospace and defense systems. Intel AEP consists of a comprehensive set of documents and technical data to assist Intel’s customers in demonstrating that its components (especially processors) are suitable for use in airborne mission-critical systems.

The four-core Intel Core i7-1186 GRE (Tiger Lake UP3) is among the processors Intel supports through its AEP program. The Intel Core i7-1185 GRE variant is functionally equivalent (as confirmed with Intel). Supporting this variant enables Wind River’s A&D customers to develop their software applications cost effectively, ahead of certification.

The A&D industry is seeing the rise of ruggedized commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. Two popular offerings that use the 1186 processor are North Atlantic Industries 68INT6, a high-performance single-board computer, and the Supermicro STS-E100-12T-H, chosen for mission-critical applications with maximum configurability and scalability. Both are designed to operate in harsh environments.

VxWorks brings proven, trusted deterministic performance to the NAI 68INT6, and Helix Platform offers efficient, risk-mitigated consolidation of safety-critical and non-safety-critical systems on both offerings. With such modular hardware, plus guest operating systems and applications running on Helix Platform, A&D vendors can develop consolidated systems that optimize space, weight, and power, an increasingly important factor in aerospace design. Additionally, hardware alignment with Intel AEP facilitates overall airframe certification.

These, as well as our ongoing enhancement programs, contribute to keeping Wind River intelligent edge products at the forefront of the industrial and A&D markets by offering our customers the assurance they need for their mission-critical systems.

For additional information, consult our product pages dedicated to VxWorks and Helix Platform.