Press Releases

“Testing is one of the most crucial factors of software development especially in the safety-critical area.” said Jacques Brygier, Vice President Marketing at SYSGO. “Skysoft’s specific ARINC 653 verification tools have helped us to offer our customers a full ARINC 653 Part 3 compliant PikeOS Personality with a maximum of reliability in a very short time.”

The PikeOS virtualization technology allows multiple applications and even operating systems to run concurrently on one hardware platform. To facilitate such a model for a safety-critical environment, execution time and memory space of each application must be protected from other applications in the system. The ARINC Specification 653, implemented in the PikeOS system software, provides the definition of an APplication EXecutive (APEX) that supports space and time partitioning of applications. 

ARINC 653 is one of the main features to assure a secure execution environment for safety-critical applications in the avionics and aerospace. Similar to the POSIX qualification schemes, the Skysoft AVT tools allow an independent verification of the presence of all required services and their conformance with the ARINC 653 Part 3 standard. Services include Inter-Partition Communication (Queuing Ports, Sampling Ports), Intra-Partition Communication (Buffers, Events, Semaphores, Blackboards), Partition Management, Process Management, Timing functions and Health-Monitor functions. 

“We were glad to work with SYSGO on this validation”, commented Tobias Schoofs, IMA Team Leader from Skysoft. ”PikeOS ‘s ARINC 653 implementation is one of the most advanced in the market, and the validation phase contributed to show the high value of our AVT product.”

Availability

PikeOS 2.2 is available now. PikeOS also supports the x86, PowerPC and MIPS processor families and offers its own personalities such as PikeOS Native, ARINC-653, Linux, POSIX and OSEK, as well as personalities from partners such as Java, Ada, μITRON, CoDeSys®, VxWorks® and FidelityVCF™.

More information at www.sysgo.com/pikeos

About Skysoft

Skysoft is a systems and software house based in Lisbon with over ten years of experience in the aerospace and telematics market. Skysoft's involvement in modern avionics began in 1996 and since then the technological know-how has been further developed. In the context of the VICTORIA project led by Thales Avionics, Skysoft developed a set of test tools to verify the conformance of components with the AIRBUS IMA API and AFDX end system technologies. Later, these tools were extended to the ARINC 653 Verification Tool (AVT) and the AFDX Robustness Test Tool (AROT), which fully cover the ARINC 653 specification.

As a result of these and many other successful IMA activities, Skysoft was invited by AIRBUS in 2004 to actively participate in the ARINC 653 committee. Skysoft is responsible for the specification of conformance testing, Part 3 of the ARINC 653 standard.Today, conformance testing is an important service in Skysoft's portfolio alongside software and project development.

www.skysoft.pt