Honeywell

Mentor Graphics Chosen by Honeywell for Critical Terrain Awareness Technology in the Aviation Industry

The need for a reliable and proven kernel is imperative for critical embedded applications – especially when the engineer is developing the newest Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) product at Honeywell for aviation applications. Mentor Graphics' Nucleus RTOS was chosen by Honeywell [NYSE: HON] for the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) - a new system that alerts pilots of dangerous terrain.

The EGPWS compares the airplane's location to an internal database of the world's terrain and provides a display of nearby terrain features. It also sounds an audible alert should the airplane approach to within about a minute's flying time of terrain.

Nucleus RTOS from Mentor Graphics was chosen for use in the application software for the MK VI, MK VIII, MK XXII (with MK XXII to be released this year for Helicopters) and GA EGPWS products by Honeywell.

Honeywell chose the high performance Nucleus RTOS kernel because of its reliable reputation in the embedded market. Nucleus RTOS has been successfully implemented in a broad base of critical embedded applications in markets including automotive, avionics, consumer electronics, industrial controls and medical instrumentation. Nucleus RTOS provides efficient, high performance task management, inter-task communication, inter-task synchronization, memory management, and component query features. Optimizations in system clock, interrupt and compiler register usage are only part of the advanced features provided by Nucleus RTOS. The kernel handles difficult issues such as priority inversion while minimizing the interrupt latency to a few microseconds.

Because of the remarkable scalability of Nucleus RTOS, Honeywell implemented only a subset of the Nucleus RTOS functions; the service calls they needed specific to their application only. Additionally, Honeywell analyzed and verified the Nucleus RTOS source code in order to support certification to the DO-178B, level C. Software partitioning was provided by using the Freescale PowerPC Memory Management (MMU), the Nucleus RTOS kernel and Honeywell-developed software.