Andreas Platschek, Opentech

Recently, different industries realized, that embedding more and more processors into their application causes many different problems, namely high power consumption, weight problems, cooling and higher costs.

From this awareness a shift from these highly distributed systems towards an integrated solutions can be observed, resulting not only in significant savings in weight, power consumption and cost, but also bringing in better scalability, higher flexibility and better reusability.

One very well known standard, backing up an integrated approach for safety critical and highly available systems, is the ARINC653 standard, which is used in many avionic applications. It specifies a lot of different things like e.g. strict partitioning in space and time, requirements to communication mechanisms, and the monitoring system. There are several proprietary implementations available on the market, but until now an open source implementation is not available.

XM ARINC provides a subset of the APEX interface introduced by ARINC653 for XtratuM2. Not implemented parts are e.g. the interpartition communication and the health monitor. The resulting system will run on the LEON2 platform, and will be suitable for the operation in satellites.

This paper describes the differences between the federated and the integrated approach,  gives an introduction to the ARINC653 specification, and describes the current state of XM ARINC. Furthermore, some thoughts on future development are given.