Wind River Supports First-Ever FAA Technical Standard Order for Fully Enabled Multi-Core Processor by RTX’s Collins Aerospace

In Collins Aerospace’s multi-core processor, cores can simultaneously execute applications across all design assurance levels. With the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration granting the company a Technical Standard Order — the first for such a system — new capabilities can be incorporated into future aircraft without recertifying flight-critical applications.

The introduction of general-purpose multi-core processor architectures improves the performance of embedded systems remarkably. However, safety-critical avionics systems have unique requirements, such as application isolation and determinism. For instance, executing multiple applications simultaneously on separate cores can generate multi-core interference, which complicates behavior analysis and applications’ worst-case execution time. Those are critical elements in determining airworthiness.

Civil avionics software systems once were monolithic systems, hosted on single core processors, which restricted what aircraft could accomplish. Collins Aerospace, an RTX business, developed and certified a multi-partitioned operating system to address the limitations, allowing multiple functions of varying design assurance levels (DALs) to safely execute on a single system-on-chip processor.

Now, Collins Aerospace — a Wind River customer — has earned a key authorization for its new multi-core processing platform that, among other achievements, provides a significant performance increase without sacrificing power consumption.

VxWorks 653 v3.0.1.1 played a critical role in enabling Collins Aerospace to achieve the FAA’s first Technical Standard Order certification for a multi-core avionics system. This milestone marks a significant leap forward in software-defined avionics, as it allows manufacturers to harness multi-core processing for performance; reduce size, weight, and power (SWaP); and prepare for future mission capabilities. It aligns with the principles of the modular open systems approach (MOSA), enabling significant cost savings over the certification lifecycle.

The FAA’s Technical Standard Orders (TSOs) define an article’s minimum performance standard. In this context, an article can be a material, part, component, process, or appliance. Each TSO covers a certain type of article. A TSO authorization permits someone to manufacture an article to the related TSO standard; it is both a design and a production approval. According to Collins Aerospace, because flight-critical applications don’t have to be recertified every time, new mission systems capabilities can be integrated in weeks rather than months or longer.

Built to meet DO-178C DAL A requirements and FAA AC 20-193 multi-core guidance, VxWorks 653 delivers MOSA conformance, hard-real-time determinism, ARINC 653 partitioning, and multi-core interference mitigation, all of which support safe, scalable, and high-performance avionics applications. This technology is foundational to Wind River Helix Virtualization Platform, which enables customers to seek AC 20-148 Reusable Software Component credit and use DO-297–compliant integrated modular avionics platform features on the latest hardware.

A modular platform approach, such as one based on VxWorks 653 or Helix Platform, makes it easier to add capabilities without requiring the entire platform to be recertified. Support for multiple guest operating systems, from various vendors or open source distributions, enables flexibility and reuse of existing applications. This also helps avoid vendor lock-in, a key tenet of a MOSA.

As the industry shifts toward certifiable multi-core architectures, Wind River remains at the forefront, providing the software foundation for future-proofed and modular avionics solutions across the industry.

For more technical information, read about the multi-core certification approach in Collins Aerospace’s white paper, which summarizes the original development collaboration.