DO-254: The other safety-critical specification

摘要

Next month's edition of Military Embedded Systems has our annual "FPGAs and Reconfigurable Computing" supplement, which is part of sister publication DSP-FPGA.com. To whet your appetite, I thought it very appropriate to focus on a thin slice of the FPGA design problem that sometimes vexes military system designers: safety-critical hardware certification.rnBy now you're probably aware that the FAA's RTCA/DO-178B "Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification" governs software certified for airborne systems ranked from levels E through A (the highest). DO-178B's rigorous test methodology makes darn certain that the software controlling the flight surfaces in an avionics system exhibits no possible aberrant behaviors and doesn't use poor coding practices such as undefined variables or priority inversions.