Mercury Teams with Green Hills for Army Aviation Mission Displays

At the recent Army Aviation Mission Solutions Summit in Nashville, Mercury Systems and Green Hills Software announced a joint collaboration leading to advances in next-generation flight display systems using multicore processor architectures. The graphics solution teams Mercury’s BuiltSAFE hardware and software with a real-time operating system (RTOS) from Green Hills Software to achieve efficiencies in size, weight, and power (SWaP). There is a particular focus on avionics computers and display systems using enhanced vision systems (EVSs) and synthetic vision systems (SVSs) for degraded vision environments (DVEs).

Mercury’s BuiltSAFE ROCK-2 subsystem features its OpenGL graphics suite. The subsystem is operated with Green Hills Software’s INTEGRITY-178 time-variant unified multiprocessing RTOS with the FliteScene Digital Moving Map Software from Harris Corp. The INTEGRITY-178 scheduling mechanism results in a unified RTOS that provides time-variant scheduling of both asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) applications simultaneously.

It also enables the creation of core affinity groups that define how processor cores will be used by graphics and other applications within the system. The combination of hardware and software conforms to the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) V2.1 Technical Standard and enables multiple independent safety and/or security-critical applications to run within the ROCK-2’s multicore operating environment in a predictable manner.

“The combination of Green Hills’ operating system innovation with Mercury’s hardware innovation delivers affordable and unparalleled technology leadership to the Army aviation community,” said Ike Song, VP and general manager of Mercury Mission Systems. “Out-of-the-box support for Harris’ FACE V2.1-conformant FliteScene software on the ROCK-2 delivers on the interoperability and portability objectives of the FACE technical standard, while eliminating the cost and design risk associated with deploying advanced digital map capabilities.”