Just like consumer markets, advances in semiconductor have considerable influence on modern avionics architectures. Migration from Federated Architecture to an Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) leads to sharing complexity, single point of failure, and great resource management effort. Federated Architecture makes use of networked hardware and software components to realize a set of applications. The concept behind IMA is to share a set of cabinet that are controlled by an ARINC 653 scheduler and interconnected via an ARINC 664 or AFDX. Each cabinet is a high-performance computing system that executes multiple avionics applications that were previous distributed across multiple systems. The cabinet must have an adequate processing and interface bandwidth to maintain the performance requirement of the individual avionics application.
IMA offers great amount of performance and power savings at a much lower cost and higher reliability for the application. Multi-core processors and shared memory architectures provide exceptional parallelizing ability but also increase the risk of overlapping virtual machines. These new-age technologies cannot be easily analyzed by using prior data or analytical methods. Tests must be run for an extensive set of use cases that ensure there are no overruns, deadlines being met, sufficient shared resources and scalable processing resources. The best way to ensure that the new IMA solution is going to achieve timing, power and reliability requirements is to conduct simulation exercises on the proposed architecture. The simulation exercise can be used early in the design cycle to evaluate the specification, validate the decision and minimize system issues in the field.
The IMA architecture give rise to many inter-related decisions such as how to distribute software tasks across processor resources, power consumed for each use-cases, identify potential failure spots, create a schedule for the ARINC 653 virtual machines, and network bandwidth for the workload and processing.
There is a fundamental shift in the way these systems are specified, designed, implemented and tested, which has required years to implement at its highest efficiency in order to maintain the high safety levels mandated in the avionics industry. We at Mirabilis Design worked with more than 20 avionics divisions by conducting early design space exploration of an Avionics SoC to a complete IMA platform modeling and simulation including Processor boards, IO boards, graphics, ARINC 664, ARINC 653 scheduling to explore design space and also performance and power analysis.
We are hosting a webinar on March 3rd 2016 to talk about the challenges and how most these challenges can be addressed with early system level modeling and simulation.
Click here to register.