Reducing trade barriers in technology exchange between US and India will create a new market for avionics organizations in India. These companies must compete on reliability, greater integration and quality, not on price alone. To facilitate this, the design teams will require new methodologies to improve engineering productivity. These methodologies must be done during the pre-engineering and systems engineering phase of the product development cycle.
Avionics design migration to multi-core processors and new scopes in architectural designs will produce a whole generation of systems engineering tools that are focused on validating system requirements at a significantly higher-level of abstraction than transaction-level models. This will change the EDA (Electronic design automation)landscape for large-scale architectural exploration software deployment. Systems in aerospace, mobile computing, and defense are migrating from single-core to multi-core processors. However, much of the software in these systems is optimized for the maximum throughput on a single core processor with a single source of data memory access.
The advent of many-core architectures and the introduction of parallel programming languages promises new challenges and promise an arduous task to shift gears. A lot of code must be transformed to concurrent and parallel threads from sequential execution. This demands a substantial change in the code development methodology and rewriting of the legacy code. A simple rewrite of the code will be insufficient. Experimenting with different software design approaches is an area where design tools will be very valuable. It would also be an extension to the current EDA tools, which are presently focused on the hardware or verifying the software built on the hardware.
Avionics is an investment-rich business and requires a extremely long-term commitment. Moreover the knowledge base is in the hands of a few, very few countries and a small number of private corporations. The migration to COTS technology will enable smaller players to provide less expensive satellite and instrumentation design. Organizations like, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and countries like, India are offering affordable rocket-on-demand to launch satellites and to encourage space tourism. Moreover these affordable solutions allow climactic vulnerable countries to invest in communication infrastructures, remote sensing for higher-quality weather forecasting, and military intelligence. Aerospace requires a lot of early feasibility studies, offering scope for new breed of systems engineering services and solution providers to emerge and aid in the design process.