Aerospace and Defense
at Wind River
Wind River services and technologies make it easier for aerospace and defense organizations to create secure, high-performance, cost-effective solutions - from the cloud to the intelligent edge.
Let Us Help You Modernize Your Systems
Many teams wrestle with how to integrate their intellectual property onto new platforms designed to extend capabilities. Wind River can help you close the gap between legacy systems and tomorrow’s requirements.
Our tools and services help you deliver innovative solutions for air, ground, sea, or space platforms. Design in software modularization that is enabled by a modern architecture and supported by open standards, proven security, and interoperability.
Delivering on A&D Objectives
Accelerate Program Delivery with Reduced Risk
Systems developers for aerospace and defense need to deliver programs on time, on budget, and without introducing unmanageable risk. Wind River:
- Makes continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) easier
- Speeds safety certifications and mitigates certification risk
- Uses full-system simulation to streamline development and lower costs
Services
Certify Safety
Proving airworthiness, especially in today’s multi-core, distributed integrated modular avionics (IMA) architectures, is one of the toughest challenges for civilian and military airframe designs. Wind River technologies have been verified in more than 750 safety programs up to DO-178C DAL A. Wind River Professional Services offers unmatched expertise in meeting safety certification standards across hundreds of programs.
» Explore Wind River Professional Services
MOSA Compliance
Enable Innovation and Reuse
New programs need features that help maintain a technological advantage, designed with a modular open systems approach (MOSA) to maximize reuse.
Wind River Helix™ Virtualization Platform’s robust partitioning allows reuse of intellectual property along with integration of your cutting-edge innovations. Helix Platform allows you to run legacy software alongside new applications, and it provides all the benefits of a consistent, scalable, and agile platform across a wide range of edge devices.
Helix Platform supports independent build, link, and load, allowing independent, asynchronous development, test, and delivery of software applications per the DO-297 IMA standard on both Arm® and Intel® architectures.
» Learn about Wind River Helix Virtualization PlatformSECURITY by Design
Ensure Security
The U.S. government mandates that the software it buys be secure by design. Wind River meets that mandate, as it complies with the NIST 800-218 standard for a secure development lifecycle and has filed attestations with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). All customers benefit from Wind River’s transparent software supply chain and secure development processes.
VxWorks and Helix Platform support compliance with the principles in DO-356A for good security design and offer the Information Assurance Framework to use hardware security capabilities to enhance overall security of avionics systems. We offer security assessments and security hardening guides to augment and extend product security capabilities.
» Explore the secure development lifecycle at Wind River » See the Attestation to U.S. Government Secure Software Development Practices » Learn about Wind River Security Services
The RTOS Name You Know
Improve Embedded System Performance
New designs must do more, faster, with fewer system resources. VxWorks is the first real-time operating system (RTOS) to support OCI-compliant containers, which ease the process of embedded application management. Running secure, isolated containers on single or distributed systems improves scalability, simplifies deployment, and enhances system update capabilities. And Helix Platform supports consolidation of mixed criticality and security onto one platform to achieve goals related to size, weight, power, and cost.
» Learn about Wind River’s container supportStandards Compliance
Conform to Industry Standards
For aerospace and defense use cases, Wind River supports essential standards that — as elsewhere — reduce costs, speed development, and ease interoperability.
- Products are aligned with a MOSA. VxWorks conforms to the FACE 3.1 Base Safety and Security profiles supporting a modular architecture based on open standards.
- Wind River Linux is conformant to the FACE™ 3.1 General Purpose Profile.
- Helix Platform conforms to the FACE 3.2 Base Safety and Security profiles.
- VxWorks and Helix Platform are ARINC 653 compliant and are proven to DO-178C DAL A. VxWorks and Helix Platform also support IEEE 1588 protocols for Time-Sensitive Networking.
Decades of Aerospace and Military Experience
With technology proven by 330 customers over 750 safety programs in more than 120 civilian and military aircraft, Wind River has over three decades of experience helping organizations build safe, secure, and reliable computing systems for demanding commercial aircraft, space exploration, and military operations.
De-risk Tomorrow’s Space Platforms
Commercial providers are using technological advancements and public-private partnerships to benefit the space economy, which encompasses launch services, space tourism, space mining, in-orbit services, and other growth segments. Commercial providers want to create differentiating solutions in these crowded fields. Wind River has a long history of helping such organizations achieve their goals.
VxWorks is the most widely used commercial RTOS in space, proven in dozens of spacecraft orbiting the earth, on the moon, on and orbiting Mars, and in the solar system. It is the only commercial RTOS to be both certified for NASA’s Core Flight Systems (cFS), an open source flight software framework used globally across a wide variety of spacecraft, and supported by the High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) platform. The VxWorks heritage of successfully supporting NASA mission class levels A through D, as well as cFS and F Prime flight software out of the box, mitigates new mission risk.
» Explore Wind River’s History: 25 Years of Intelligent Systems in SpaceMission-Critical Linux
Deliver Cloud-to-Edge Excellence
Wind River’s eLxr™ Pro is a Linux distribution created expressly for mission-critical applications, spanning the cloud-to-edge domain. eLxr Pro has community-hardened packages and commercial support from Wind River.
Discover eLxr Pro
Leading Aerospace and Defense Companies Trust Wind River
Optimized for Software Acquisition Pathway
Wind River Studio Developer is Awardable by the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace. The Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace is the premier offering of Tradewinds, the Department of Defense (DOD) suite of tools and services designed to accelerate the procurement and adoption of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data and analytics capabilities.
CISA Compliant
A Secure Software Development Lifecycle
Wind River complies with Executive Order 14028. As attested to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), our products are produced in accordance with the Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in NIST SP 800-218.
» Learn more about the software development lifecycleA Word About Aptiv Acquisition for U.S. Defense Customers
The acquisition of Wind River by Aptiv in December 2022 brought together synergistic technologies and decades of experience in delivering safety-critical systems. Wind River’s commitment to aerospace and defense is unwavering, and our investment and strategy remain focused on delivering safe, secure, and reliable solutions.
As part of Aptiv, Wind River has enhanced resources for our next phase of growth, which will allow us to further accelerate our investment and efforts for you. The opportunity for our customers to leverage Wind River’s investments in cloud-native software solutions is further enhanced by our relationship with Aptiv, as we collectively enable our clients’ digital transformation.
» Learn more about the acquisition
Wind River Studio Developer
For aerospace and defense development teams modernizing or transforming the development, deployment, and operation of their intelligent systems, Wind River Studio has been architected to easily scale to simultaneously run different projects with multiple operating systems and hardware architectures, all from a single pane of glass.
» Explore Wind River Studio Developer
VxWorks
Bullet proof, future-proof: VxWorks supports containers for app deployment (the first and only RTOS to do so), C++17, Boost, Rust, Python, and more. And it’s still #1 (VDC). Lower your procurement and certification costs while meeting stringent industry standards such as DO-178C, IEC 61508, ISO 26262, ARINC 653, POSIX®, and FACE™ using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) standards conformance and safety certification evidence.
» Explore VxWorks
Wind River Linux
Wind River Linux delivers military-grade Linux with a combination of system-level security reinforcements, such as access control mechanisms and intrusion detection and prevention tools, with long-term security update strategies for deployed devices. With validated, maintained, and supported source code, as well as a comprehensive suite of services including CVE monitoring, Wind River Linux is certified for ISO 9001 and for conformance to the FACE™ Technical Standard as an Operating System Segment (OSS) that supports the General Purpose Profile (GPP).
» Explore Wind River Linux
Wind River Helix Virtualization Platform
Based on our industry-leading VxWorks 653, Helix Platform consolidates and separates multi-OS and mixed-criticality apps on a single platform. Simplify, secure, and future-proof your aerospace and defense systems.
» Explore Helix Platform
Intel® Simics®
Create digital twins of complex systems and run cyber tests (including pen testing) virtually. Enable agile practices throughout your product’s lifecycle with system simulation and automation technologies.
Intel and Simics are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.
» Explore Intel® Simics®
Wind River Cloud Platform
Wind River Cloud Platform, powered by the robust StarlingX, delivers an edge-to-cloud management solution, accelerating the deployment and operation of mission-critical systems and assets.
» Explore Wind River Cloud Platform
eLxr Pro
eLxr Pro™ enables embedded, far to near edge, and enterprise use cases with a Linux OS that’s reliable, real time, robust, right sized, and resilient. eLxr Pro transforms complex embedded systems into streamlined, efficient, and highly functional solutions, ensuring optimal performance and adaptability for A&D enterprise needs.
» Explore eLxr Pro
Industry Standards
Wind River makes it easier and more cost-effective for technology suppliers to meet the stringent requirements of the aerospace and defense industries, with support for industry standards such as ARINC 653, FACE™, RTCA DO-178B and DO-178C, IEC 61508, POSIX®, and more.
» Learn About Our Standards LeadershipResources
Website
For nearly three decades, Wind River has provided NASA with the most proven software platform to bring dozens of intelligent systems to space, resulting in some of the most significant space missions in history.
White Paper
This paper discusses the development of a next-generation smart avionics platform and former experiences.
White Paper
Learn how our industry leadership in TSN manifests in VxWorks, the world's most widely used RTOS.
Blog
Stay up to date with the latest insights into the evolving landscape of intelligent systems in the aerospace and defense sectors.
Video
Given an onboard computer running VxWorks to operate a space vehicle, we’ll look at the benefits of time-sensitive networking (TSN) for critical controller devices.
White Paper
Learn how Linux, RTOSes, and other operating systems fit in environments where safety is paramount.