Terma North America and Green Hills Software announced the selection of the INTEGRITY-178 tuMP real-time operating system (RTOS) for Terma's next-generation family of Electronic Warfare Controllers, the AN/ALQ-213(v5). The AN/ALQ-213(v5) will be used as part of Terma North America's recent $306 Million indefinite-delivery indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA)-Aviation at Warner Robins in support of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) to provide self-protection hardware, sustainment, and engineering services under the Enterprise Contract to the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC).
Terma selected the INTEGRITY-178 tuMP RTOS based on several factors:
- Certified conformance to the FACE Technical Standard, in support of Terma's modular open system approach (MOSA).
- Designed to meet DO-178C DAL A airborne safety requirements.
- High multicore performance while meeting both safety and security requirements.
- Unrivaled security pedigree, including certification of INTEGRITY-178 to the NSA-defined Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP).
- Support for system integrity solutions in an FPGA-based multicore Arm architecture to meet evolving system security engineering (SSE) requirements.
- Free from foreign influence – all design, development, and maintenance of INTEGRITY-178 tuMP are performed by US citizens in a US facility owned by a US company.
The combination of system integrity, safety, and multicore performance made INTEGRITY-178 tuMP the clear choice for next-generation of electronic warfare controllers. Using a commercial operating system certified to the FACE Technical Standard is part of an open system architecture to provide flexible, cost-effective solutions for advanced aircraft survivability equipment. Terma has been using INTEGRITY-178 tuMP for a couple of years and it has made it easy to achieve our system safety, integrity, and multicore performance goals simultaneously.
Terma North America AN/ALQ-213(v5) Electronic Warfare Controller (EWC) offers a versatile, independent, non-ITAR controller solution for military Aircraft Survivability Equipment (ASE) suites. The ALQ-213(v5) EWC belongs to Terma's family of controllers, in service on 2,500+ aircraft, counting 25+ different platform types operated by more than 15 different countries around the globe. The AN/ALQ-213 allows for the integration of any EW subsystem, such as radar-, missile-, and laser-warning, direct infrared countermeasures systems, jammers, decoys, and dispensers. A unique feature of the ALQ-213 family of controllers is that the same product can be used across a mixed fleet of aircraft (fighters, helicopters, and fixed-wing transport aircraft) because the products have been developed to be platform-independent. Under the DLA IDIQ contract, the next-generation AN/ALQ-213(v5) is available for domestic and foreign military sales (FMS) on any model and block of USAF aircraft, with initial plans for F-16, C-130J, and A-10.
Green Hills Software is pleased to be part of Terma's next-generation EWC and its longstanding leadership in electronic warfare management systems. From the beginning, Terma believes that safety and security go hand-in-hand, and the AN/ALQ-213(v5) is a prime example of the combined requirement. Systems that do not deploy system integrity concepts cannot ensure continued safety, and likewise, secure systems benefit from the high availability and integrity of safety-critical architectures.
The INTEGRITY-178 tuMP high-assurance RTOS from Green Hills Software uniquely is designed to meet both DO-178C DAL A airborne safety requirements and the NSA-defined Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP) for "high robustness" security at Common Criteria EAL 6+. Beyond the separation kernel, INTEGRITY-178 tuMP provides a complete set of APIs for use by multi-level security (MLS) applications within a secure partition, e.g., an MLS guard, which is a fundamental requirement in a cross-domain system (CDS). INTEGRITY-178 tuMP is a multicore RTOS with support for running a multi-threaded DAL A application across multiple processor cores in symmetric multi-processing (SMP) or bound multi-processing (BMP) configurations, as well as supporting the more basic asymmetric multi-processing (AMP).
INTEGRITY-178 tuMP was the first RTOS to be certified conformant to the FACE Technical Standard, edition 3.0, and it is the only RTOS with multicore interference mitigation for all shared resources. Multicore interference happens when more than one processor core attempts simultaneous access of a shared resource, such as system memory, I/O, or the on-chip interconnect. The bandwidth allocation and monitoring (BAM) functionality in INTEGRITY-178 tuMP ensures that critical applications get their allocated access to shared resources to meet their required deadlines, significantly lowering integration and certification risk. Together, the flexible multi-processing architecture and the multicore interference mitigation enable a system integrator to maximize multicore processor performance while meeting safety and security requirements.
Click here to learn more about this electronic warfare controller.
