Military Embedded Systems

More complex combat-helicopter engines require large increases in diagnostic/prognostic capability, which also require a greater number of sensor inputs to the electronic engine controls (EECs.) At the same time, military helicopters face the increased need for resilient cybersecurity. Together, these trends drive the need for multicore processors in the EECs, despite the challenge of ensuring real-time determinism when different processor cores compete for the same shared resources. The foundation for a solution to both challenges is a certified, hardened real-time operating system (RTOS) with multicore interference mitigation. Multicore interference mitigation enforces real-time determinism even when multiple processor cores are vying for access to the same processor resources.

Operating an aircraft in a degraded visual environment (DVE) is one of the most challenging and stressful tasks for a military pilot, particularly during landing. There are many causes of DVE conditions, including naturally occurring smoke, fog, smog, clouds, sand, dust, heavy rain, blowing snow, darkness, and flat light. Those conditions can happen in combination, and some of the most challenging DVE is induced by the aircraft itself, creating a brownout or whiteout from dust, sand, or snow. Mitigation solutions for the problem of operating aircraft in a DVE fall into a few broad categories: enhanced vision, synthetic vision, and a combination of the two.

Almost every part of our modern economy depends on the Global Positioning System, or GPS. For example, agriculture, construction, mining, rail transportation, and search and rescue all rely on the accurate position, navigation, and timing (PNT) enabled by GPS. An even broader set of industries – communications networks, banking transactions, financial markets, and power grids – rely on GPS for precise time synchronization, to such an extent that most systems would cease working without it. Alternative navigation (ALTNAV) systems can supplement GPS systems in GPS-denied environments using internal clocks and onboard sensors, and those ALTNAV systems should be protected from cyberattacks as well.

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. Green Hills Software has extended certified multicore support of its INTEGRITY-178 tuMP safety-critical real-time operating system (RTOS) to the 11th-gen Intel Core i7 processor (formerly Tiger Lake). INTEGRITY-178 tuMP is the only RTOS to be part of the certification of a multicore system to DO-178C and CAST-32A multicore requirements.

A zero-trust security posture assumes every user and device is untrusted, even if it is located within the protected perimeter of the local network. The concepts of such perimeterless security have been around for more than a decade, including the “black core” in the architectural vision of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Global Information Grid. Integrators of embedded systems who must have the highest levels of security for such applications as electronic warfare (EW) warning systems can layer higher-level security – such as advanced analytics – atop the embedded computer’s real-time operating system (RTOS) to complete the zero-trust architecture.