Abaco | DO-178C Testing For An Avionic Mission Computer
The Challenge
Abaco were half way through DO-178C certification for their FORCE2C Avionic Mission computer, when they learned that Harmonic Software Systems had just completed DO-178C certification on the previous generation of hardware for VxWorks 7. HSS were brought onboard to certify ‘bare metal’ software that executes before the operating system is loaded. This was particularly challenging as the hardware can reboot, causing tools to catastrophically disconnect and test flow to be interrupted. In addition, all the external hardware needed to be tested, which included 1553, Arinc429, multiple Ethernet connections, many I2C devices as well as Flash and an FPGA.
The Solution
We mastered the Lauterbach debugger (with it’s quirky lack of spaces and use of parentheses (unfortunately nowhere near Lisp)), and used it as part of an automated testing framework to execute requirements based tests and compare them against expected results extracted from the SVCP (Software Verification Cases and Procedures) document. In addition, Vectorcast was mastered to provide 100% code coverage. Our testing system identified many issues with the software under test resulting in a safe, reliable and above all certified system ready for flight!