TOP FOCUS JUNE 2018 - WA3000 eMagazin

Wind River introduces VxWorks 653 on Arm Architecture

Whether building a new aircraft or designing new capabilities into industrial and medical control systems, choosing the right system software and hardware architectures is crucial for the success of the program. The aerospace and defense industry and the embedded community continue to shift towards adopting the latest hardware to solve challenging performance problems that address a variety of workloads.

Video VxWorks 653: When Safety Matters

To solve this challenge, avionics suppliers have been gravitating towards using a mixture of powerful commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware platforms coupled with standards-based open virtualization platforms to extract value across multiple product lines, aircraft, and use cases.
Wind River is a trusted partner that supports customers on their digital transformation path. Having the highest levels of safety and security addressing the most challenging environments, Wind River’s VxWorks^® 653 Multi-core Edition is now available on Arm^® architecture. This allows customers to quickly adapt to changing business needs and respond to the growing desire for innovation and workload consolidation at fundamental levels, starting with the architecture upon which their safety-critical system is based. With this latest release, Wind River brings its portfolio of safe and secure platforms to all the major hardware architectures. Having already added support for VxWorks 653 on Intel architecture earlier this year means that programs can save costs and accelerate time-to-market (TTM) by consolidating legacy and new applications on the hardware platform of their choice, while providing a safe and secure software foundation that is open, renders high levels of technology readiness and re-use, and lowers certification risks and costs throughout the entire product lifecycle. The next-generation avionics and industrial systems can now be built using a standards-based, open virtualization platform capable of running multiple operating environments across Arm, Intel, and Power processor architectures. VxWorks 653 is a certification-ready platform capable of abstracting and running any type of workload, including legacy and new, with multiple levels of safety.

Why is Arm architecture support important?

VxWorks 653 has been tested and validated on the Arm^® Cortex^® A53 (Xilinx UltraScale + MPSoC). Arm-based CPUs are found in both the edge computing and high-performance computing spaces, and Arm technology enables mission critical applications to run at the desired performance levels in a low SWaP envelope and cost-effective way.