Honeywell
"We needed the ultimate in reliability for a critical safety system like EGPWS and Nucleus OS met all of our requirements." --C. Don Bateman, chief engineer, Honeywell.
Mentor Graphics Chosen by Honeywell for Critical Terrain Awareness Technology in the Aviation Industry
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 OS 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 OS kernel because of its reliable reputation in the embedded market. Nucleus OS 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 OS 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 OS. 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 OS, Honeywell implemented only a subset of the Nucleus OS functions; the service calls they needed specific to their application only. Additionally, Honeywell analyzed and verified the Nucleus OS 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 OS kernel and Honeywell-developed software.