Wind River
, recently released from Intel, has announced the availability of VxWorks 653
Multi-core Edition on the ARM architecture
. The platform offers the highest levels of dependability and security for the most demanding environments. Customers can now quickly adapt to changing business needs and meet the growing need for innovation and consolidation of application workloads – starting with the architecture on which their dependability system is based.
Whether building a new aircraft or designing new features for industrial or medical control systems, choosing the right software and hardware architectures is critical to success. The aerospace and defense industry and the embedded world are increasingly opting for state-of-the-art hardware to solve complex performance challenges across a variety of application workloads. As a result, avionics manufacturers are increasingly looking to use a mix of COTS hardware platforms and open, industry-standard virtualization platforms to leverage a multitude of product lines, aircraft, and scenarios.
With this latest release of VxWorks 653, Wind River is enabling enterprises to access its portfolio of safe and secure platforms across all major hardware architectures. With VxWorks 653’s support for Intel architecture announced earlier this year and the new compatibility introduced today, manufacturers can realize cost savings and reduce time to market (TTM) by consolidating new and legacy applications onto the hardware platform of their choice, while providing a safe and secure software foundation that is open, offers high levels of technology maturity and reuse, and reduces certification risks and costs throughout the product lifecycle.
Enterprises can now build next-generation avionics and industrial systems on an open, industry-standard virtualization platform that can run a variety of operating environments on ARM, Intel and Power processor architectures. VxWorks 653 is a pre-certified platform that can abstract and run any task, including “legacy” applications, with varying levels of dependability.
VxWorks 653 has been tested and validated on the ARM Cortex A53 processor ARM Cortex A53 (Xilinx UltraScale + MPSoC). The ARM ecosystem is found in edge computing and high-performance computing, where this technology can enable critical applications to achieve desired performance levels within embedded constraints (limiting size, weight, and power) in a cost-effective manner. The Cortex-A53 is one of the most widely used 64-bit ARM cores and is an ideal choice in terms of maturity for defense and aerospace OEMs and developers of rugged embedded applications.
The multi-core VxWorks 653 for Arm architecture provides 64-bit support for both the virtualization layer and guest operating systems such as VxWorks 7 and Linux. As microprocessor technologies evolve, Wind River will continue to integrate the best hardware support options into its products and introduce dependability, security and reliability solutions to help create cost-effective, pre-certified, mission-critical applications.
The vendor intends to commit to multi-year customer commitments to ensure that its portfolio of safe and secure software can cover a wide variety of aircraft computers, industrial control systems and architectures. Robust and open multi-core consolidation platforms are already in place. Avionics suppliers and equipment manufacturers can now choose the hardware architecture and open virtualization platform that best meets their needs.