White Paper

Mercury OpenVPX mission computer (ROCK-II) Mission computing characteristics Mission and flight computers must be proven to be intrinsically safe to meet commercial flight safety requirements if they are to be operated in commercial airspace. Regulated by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Joint Aviation Authorities (JAA) and Transport Canada, com- pliance to this requirement is certified to various Design Assurance Levels (DAL) depending upon the level of system criticality. Mission processing is characterized by its high reliability and determinism, which collectively constitutes inherent safety. Safety is mandated for mission-critical applications (e.g. avionics, vetronics, fire con- trol, displays, etc.) and has to be certified for compliance. The hardware architecture of the central compute resource would in- clude the redundancy required for flight safety certification. The system would be segmented into different zones, each of which could have a different level of safety and security. Distributed, federated platform processing limits Technology is advancing faster than ever and the pace will continue to accelerate. Today's federated approach to platform processing is insuf- ficiently agile to offset fast evolving challenges and doesn't meet SWaP performance requirements, especially in regards to smaller UAVs. Fur- ther, the federated approach is inherently complex, intrinsically risky, slow to deploy and is difficult to make safe and secure. Five key conditions limit the federated platform architecture and each one of them is becoming increasingly expensive to accommodate: • Sensors are predominantly, siloed capabilities requiring cus- tom integration into their respective platforms. There are few standard interfaces, protocols or interoperability considerations built in to them and they are not easy to reuse. • Duplication as each siloed sensor invariably has many sup- port functions that are duplicated between sensors, including positioning navigation, timing, analog/digital conversion and processing. • Security is implemented to varying degrees across the platform's processing subassemblies, with technologies from multiple vendors. This creates large attack surfaces and many needless seams and nodes. Making these complex networks and processing resources secure is inherently complicated and difficult. • Safety certification is required for most mission and flight computer functions to prove that they are intrinsically safe and reliable. With so many standalone sensors and processing sub- assemblies, safety certification is also needlessly complicated and difficult to implement. • Performance is restricted as data is limited to the platform's data bus and proprietary sensor I/Os, many of which are antiquated, putting a cap on platform processing capability and bandwidth. Compute refreshes are further hindered limiting the platform's processing ability to execute new missions. The federated approach to platform processing is buckling faster, and as technology evolution accelerates and commercial solutions become avail- able, it becomes evermore ineffective making a dominant defense posture increasingly elusive. "The modern consumer electronics industry moves at a breakneck pace. Each generation of smartphone brings such startling innovation that we forget what was deemed impossible just a few years prior. By contrast, aviation moves at a broken pace. Safety is rightfully paramount, but well-intentioned regulation has overburdened develop- ment processes." Ryan Braun, Chief Operating Officer, uAvionix Corporation Technology and threat countermeasure evolution has enabled analog platform processing to morph into today's federated architecture, deliv- ering improved capability along the way. The evolution has largely been implemented through the introduction of processing subsystems behind smarter sensors and the addition of mission and flight computers to aid the pilot to utilize the array of mission effectors and countermeasures. Without a holistic, top-down approach to implementing and integrating these functions, the result has been a dramatic increase in duplication and complexity, while performance and capability are progressively be- coming missed opportunities. 5 Analog and federated architectures

• Cover