CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA March 24, 2010 GE Intelligent Platforms today announced support for the latest VxWorks 653 Platform, Wind River’s real-time operating environment for controlling complex, safety-critical, ARINC 653 Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) systems. The VxWorks 653 platform is used in more than 180 subsystems by over 100 customers worldwide in more than 40 airframes, including the Boeing 787 Dreamliner™. The new platform’s innovative technology – now available for the first time for single board computers based on the Intel® Core™2 Duo processor – will provide GE Intelligent Platforms’ customers with an important competitive advantage in developing and delivering civil and military solutions that require the highest levels of safety certification while reducing program risk, shortening time-to-market and minimizing expense.
“The need for integrating safety-critical applications and devices in avionics is expanding rapidly,” said Peter Cavill, General Manager, Military & Aerospace Products at GE Intelligent Platforms. “Availability of this new platform from Wind River, in tandem with our high performance hardware product offering, allows us to deliver compelling integrated modular avionics solutions for safety-critical platforms.”
“Providing customers with choice in hardware and software allows them to create solutions that can deliver better performance-to-cost ratios depending on their specific projects; it also helps to decrease overall operating expenditures,” said Marc Brown, vice president, Marketing and Strategy, VxWorks Products, Wind River. “By working with GE Intelligent Platforms, we are helping customers realize efficiencies by using commercial off-the-shelf hardware solutions and the newly-enhanced capabilities of VxWorks 653 in their advanced avionics systems.”
The GE Intelligent Platforms V7768 is one of a broad family of GE Intelligent Platforms’ single board computers to feature the Intel Core 2 Duo processor, with support for both 3U and 6U form factors, as well as VPX, VMEbus and CompactPCI. Many of these products are available in five ruggedization levels specifically designed to cope with the harsh environments typical of military and aerospace environments.
ARINC 653 is used extensively on new civil aircraft and new military aircraft produced by companies such as Airbus, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Avionics suppliers have also expressed the desire to use an ARINC 653 APEX (application executive) on regional, business and private aircraft, as well as unmanned aerial systems and vehicles (UAS and UAV), where space, weight and power (SWaP) reduction is critical. Wind River’s VxWorks 653 Platform conforms to the ARINC 653 specification to enable this compression of standalone federated systems into a single hardware environment. In addition, the VxWorks 653 platform also supports concurrent, independent application development as specified by the DO-297 standard, allowing avionics functional updates to be made with minimal impact on the integrated computing platform, thus fundamentally reducing development complexity costs. VxWorks 653 Platform also includes DO-178B qualified development tools that allow the rapid configuration and insertion of new software modules into the shared avionics platform without forcing a re-test of the entire environment, rapidly enabling system reconfiguration and tech refresh programs.
VxWorks 653 Platform is available for the GE Intelligent Platforms V7768, a VMEbus single board computer offering up to 2.16 GHz of processing speed via an Intel Core2 Duo processor with up to 2 GBytes of DDR2 SDRAM. It integrates the Intel 945GME Express chipset, together with a range of flexible I/O options including dual Gigabit Ethernet, two SATA interfaces, four USB 2.0 ports, keyboard/mouse/SVGA on the front panel, and a PCI-X® capable PMC site.
The V7768 also offers a Intel® Celeron® M processor option that allows for an upper operating temperature limit 20 degrees higher than that for the Core 2-based option. The V7768 provides further customer-defined I/O capabilities with the board-to-board connector for the PMC237CM1/V PMC expansion board, which gives customers three additional PMC expansion sites in addition to the PCI-X PMC site on the V7768.
About GE Intelligent Platforms
GE Intelligent Platforms is an experienced, high-performance technology company and a global provider of software, hardware, services, and expertise in automation and embedded computing. We offer a unique foundation of agile and reliable technology providing customers a sustainable advantage in the industries they serve, including energy, water, consumer packaged goods, government & defense, and telecommunications. GE Intelligent Platforms is headquartered in Charlottesville, VA. For more information, visit www.ge-ip.com.