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Since 2000, avionics is facing several changes, mostly driven by technological improvements in the electronics industry and innovation requirements from aircraft manufacturers. First, it has progressively lost its technological leadership over innovation processes. Second, the explosion of the electronics consumer industry has contributed to shorten even more its technology life cycles, and promoted the use of COTS. Third, the increasing complexity of avionics systems, which integrate more and more functions, have encouraged new players to enter the market. The aim of this article is to analyze how technological changes can affect the competitiveness of avionics firms. We refer to criticality levels as a determinant of the market competitiveness. Certification processes and costs could stop new comers to bring innovations from the consumer electronics industry and protects traditional players.

Avionics systems distributed on AFDX networks are subject to stringent real-time constraints that require the system designer to have techniques and tools to guarantee the worst case traversal time of the network (WCTT) and thus ensure a correct global real-time behavior of the distributed applications/functions. The network calculus is an active research area based on the (min,+) algebra, that has been developed to compute such guaranteed bounds. There already exists several academics implementations but no up to date industrial implementation. To address this need, the PEGASE project gathers academics and industrial partners to provide a high quality, efficient and safe tool for the design of avionic networks using worst case performance guarantees. The PEGASE software is an up-to-date software in the sense that it integrates the latest results of the theories, in tight cooperation with academics researchers.

I Certification of a mono or multicore processor is going to request to demonstrate that we are able to master the determinism of the execution for all the applications which are going to be executed. Regarding the multicore we introduce a level of complexity to be managed regarding the execution of the application in parallel on each of the cores of the multicore processor whatever is the internal architecture of the processor. In an IMA context: This determinism is insured by the control of the WCET allowing defining a maximal boundary for all the accesses to all the services offered by the Operating System. The Platform Provider has no information about the applications which are going to be executed by his platform. In this condition the computation of a WCET on a multi-core, like it is done currently on a mono-core, will be realized by introducing constraints at the level of the internal functioning of the multi-core processor.

Avionics is one kind of domain where prevention prevails. Nonetheless fails occur. Sometimes due to pilot misreacting, flooded in information. Sometimes information itself would be better verified than trusted. To avoid some kind of failure, it has been thought to add an new kind of embedded monitoring that enable adaptation.

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.

Avionics is one kind of domain where prevention prevails. Nonetheless failures occur, sometimes due to pilot misreacting, flooded in information. Sometimes information itself would be better verified than trusted. To avoid some kind of failure, it has been thought to add,in midst of the ARINC664 aircraft data network, a new kind of monitoring.

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.

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.

Projected capacitive touchscreen (PCAP) became popular thanks to the introduction of the Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod. Electrical field generated for touch detection is known to be impaired by external fields, for example Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp, USB charger or AMLCD driving. Commercial product shall live with this issue, but the high intensity radiated field required for avionics application is several orders of magnitude higher than required for commercial product. In such an environment, standard touchscreens could have hazardous behavior. Thanks to the unique 20 years' experience on projected capacitive technology (Aircraft fighter), we designed a new projected capacitive touchscreen, based on a ruggedized touch controller and dedicated ASIC, able to operate in extreme electromagnetic environment.