Search Results

One particular issue with the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components in Airborne Electronic Hardware (AEH) is that they have not been developed to the applicable avionics industry standards such as ED-80/DO-254 [DO-254] and their development and design data generally remain proprietary, hence not available for review to the levels expected by those standards for certification. A previous (2016-2017) research sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Software and Digital Systems (SDS) program on assurance for AEH was intended to assess the feasibility of COTS AEH assurance possibly achieved at system level, i.e. going beyond or beside ED-80/DO-254, and/or using the current practices of ED-79A/ARP-4754A [ARP4754] for systems.

The efficiency of the glass cockpit paradigm has faded away with the densification of the aeronautical environment. Today's problem lies with “non-defective aircraft” monitored by “perfectly trained crews” still involved in fatal accidents. One explanation is, at crew level, that we have reached a system complexity that, while acceptable in normal conditions, is hardly compatible with human cognitive abilities in degraded conditions. The current mitigation of such risk still relies on the enforcement through intensive training of an ability to manage extremely rare (off-normal) situations. These are explained by the potential combination of failures of highly complex systems with variable environment & with variable humans.

For more than 40 years, Gordon Moore's experimental law has been predicting the evolution of the number of transistors in integrated circuits, thereby guiding electronics developments. Until last years, this evolution did not have any measurable impact on components' quality; but the trend is beginning to reverse. This paper is addressing the impact of scaling on the reliability of integrated circuits. It is analyzing - from both qualitative and quantitative point of view - the behavior of Deep Sub-Micron technologies in terms of robustness and reliability. It is particularly focusing on three basics of safety analyses for aeronautical systems: failure rates, lifetimes and atmospheric radiations' susceptibility.