First Multicore Smart Display Certified to DAL A Uses INTEGRITY-178 tuMP RTOS

“With the ability to be the primary flight display and to consolidate key navigation information onto a single screen, this Smart Multi-Function Display enhances situational awareness in all phases of flight,” said Don Paolucci, Vice President, Engineering, at CMC Electronics. “For these critical functions operating up to DAL A and the deterministic operation on a multicore processor, we depend on the multicore robust partitioning in the INTEGRITY-178 tuMP RTOS.”

The MFD-3068 is the latest generation of displays from CMC. CMC’s MFD-3068 offers high-performance multicore processing capability and an unrivalled set of interfaces, including digital conversion while supporting commercial serial interface standards as well as MIL-STD-1553. The MFD-3068 also provides video input and output ports.
Equipped with ARINC-653 compliant platform services, the display is capable of hosting multiple high-demanding software applications developed to varying design assurance levels, up to DAL A. This display solution with Green Hills INTEGRITY-178 tuMP RTOS and CMC’s middleware allows customers to host their own applications, as well as applications from CMC and 3rd parties, providing significant flexibility in meeting customer needs. Examples of CMC-hosted applications include Electronic Flight Instrument System (EFIS) functions with optional Synthetic Vision Systems (SVS), Digital map, and software Flight Management System (FMS). The MFD-3068 smart display received authorization for three TSOs: TSO-C113 “Airborne Multipurpose Electronic Displays,” TSO-C165 “Electronic Map Display Equipment for Graphical Depiction of Aircraft Position,” and TSO-C209 “Electronic Flight Instrument System (EFIS) Display.”

“Green Hills Software is pleased to have collaborated with CMC Electronics in their second set of TSO approvals,” said Dan O’Dowd, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Green Hills Software. “While our competitors are claiming multicore certification requires more research, Green Hills has enabled four different multicore TSO authorizations on two different systems deployed across both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft.”

The INTEGRITY-178 tuMP high-assurance RTOS from Green Hills Software is the only RTOS that has actually been part of a multicore system certified to DO-178C airborne safety requirements. INTEGRITY-178 tuMP is a multicore RTOS with support for running a multi-threaded DAL A application across multiple processor cores in symmetric multi-processing (SMP) or bound multi-processing (BMP) configurations, as well as supporting the more basic asymmetric multi-processing (AMP). INTEGRITY-178 tuMP was the first RTOS to be certified conformant to the FACE Technical Standard, edition 3.0, and it is the only RTOS with multicore interference mitigation for all shared resources, enabling the system integrator to meet CAST-32A objectives.

Multicore interference happens when more than one processor core attempts simultaneous access of a shared resource, such as system memory, I/O, or the on-chip interconnect. To further ease compliance to CAST-32A, Green Hills provides bandwidth allocation and monitoring (BAM) functionality in INTEGRITY-178 tuMP that ensures that critical applications get their allocated access to shared resources in order to meet their required deadlines, significantly lowering integration and certification risk. Together, the flexible multi-processing architecture and the multicore interference mitigation enable a system integrator to maximize multicore processor performance while meeting safety and security requirements.

Additional Resources:
• CMC press release
TSO Certification for the World’s First Multicore Smart Multi-Function Display
• INTEGRITY-178 tuMP white paper on meeting CAST-32A objectives:
Solving Multicore Interference for Safety-Critical Applications