INDUSTRY

Providing further evidence of its commitment to broaden the solution space addressed by the company's products, Radstone Technology today announced availability of Seaweed's Certifiable Open GL on a platform that combines Radstone hardware, a certifiable BSP in development for Radstone by Ultra Electronics Datel, and Wind River's VxWorks AE653. Radstone Technology is the world's leading independent supplier of rugged, high-performance, embedded computer products for defense and aerospace applications. "We're delighted to be extending our relationship with Seaweed - an industry leader - to help create a certifiable solution that we believe will greatly enlarge the market opportunity for Radstone products," said Simon Collins, Graphics Product Manager at Radstone Technology. "Not only does this announcement allow new customers to take advantage of Radstone's state of the art graphics capabilities, it also allows them to achieve DO-178B certifiable solutions more readily than was previously possible." Debuted to a select gathering at the Farnborough Air Show, the new capability will receive its first major public showing in North America on the Radstone stand at the Digital Avionics Systems Conference (Salt Lake City, October 24-28). It will be shown concurrently on the Ultra Electronics Datel stand (17) at the Military Avionics Show (London, England, October 28-29). "This announcement represents a significant step forward in the availability of a true, off the shelf, certifiable solution," said Phil Cole, Vice President, Sales & Marketing at Seaweed Systems. "Customers should have a high degree of confidence in an offering that is the result of the combined efforts of the industry's leading players. We're delighted to be working with Radstone, and to see Seaweed's certifiable Open GL becoming more widely available." Radstone has gone a stage further than other companies in the market by working with industry leaders to bring about a solution that more completely addresses customers' complete requirements, and that enlarges the safety-critical market served by COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware and software. OpenGL is the most viable standard for graphical avionics application development and it has become widely accepted as a consequence. Through the use of already-certifiable OpenGL packages, avionics developers can reduce costs, take advantage of a more certain route to certification and shorten development and deployment timescales. "We see growing demand for systems that are certifiable to DO-178B," said Joe Wlad, Product Manager, Safety Critical Products, Wind River, "but, until now, customers have been forced to engineer the hardware platform in house. This announcement is important because it provides customers with a larger element of their final application, combining hardware, operating system software and development tools - and the provider of each of the elements is a leader in its own right."