EADS / Airbus licenses SYSGO as official ADFX Supplier
SYSGO, a leading supplier of embedded software solutions for the world’s most demanding safety and security applications, announced the signature of a licensing contract with EADS Group for the Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX®). Thanks to this contract, worldwide aircraft manufacturers and their sub-contractors have the guarantee that SYSGO’s AFDX solutions have received full agreement from EADS.
Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX) is a standardized high-quality data network that provides guaranteed bandwidth and secure communications. It has been developed by Airbus for its new-generation airliners, starting with A380 jetliner and became a de-facto standard for networking in avionics as defined in ARINC 664. It can be tailored to an aircraft’s avionics configuration while offering simultaneous emission and reception up to 100 Mbit/sec., and it handles the routing and regulation of traffic by active elements.
“We are happy to see SYSGO joining our licensing program,” said Wulf Hoeflich, Head of Technology Licensing at EADS/Airbus. “The EADS Technology License gives access to the AFDX-IP and trademark owned by Airbus and ensures that the implementation is vetted and ready for transfer, with processes that guarantee compliance with company regulations and governmental controls.”
The software based AFDX solutions from SYSGO is one of the first DO-178B qualified implementation of the market. The implementation in software offers design possibilities that hardware solutions cannot provide. Software AFDX is portable, more flexible and much more affordable compared to the currently used ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits). Portable AFDX consists of the AFDX Node implementation and the very small footprint host driver. ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) run on the AFDX Node, which gain more processing time for other tasks.
The AFDX Node configuration is based on a simple CSV text file that allows the use of standard tools for configuration editing and also eases the automated conversion of existing AFDX configurations. SYSGO's software AFDX avoids the high design risks and extensive development costs of a hardware solution and provides the opportunity to incorporate customer ideas and be ready for future challenges and future projects.
“SYSGO has developed innovative technologies for the safety and security applications that are now well recognized by the avionics industry,” said Michael Tiedemann, CEO of SYSGO. “This agreement with EADS was therefore a natural move for us and reinforces our development strategy around leading technologies. Our software based AFDX solutions is another evidence of our commitment to innovation allied with high quality and standards compliance”.
About AFDX
"Avionic Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet" (AFDX/ARINC 664 part 7) is a specification of a deterministic aircraft data network bus system for commercial and other aircrafts. The network is based on standard 802.3 Ethernet technology components to reduce the overall costs for the aircraft network. AFDX extends the standard Ethernet by adding Quality of Service (QoS) and deterministic behavior with a guaranteed dedicated bandwidth.