Skip to the main content.
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER

MISSION CRITICAL EDGE CUSTOMER USE CASE
GENERAL ATOMICS

WHO IS GENERAL ATOMICS?

General Atomics is a defense and diversified technologies company, founded in 1955 as a Division of General Dynamics and acquired by the Blue family in 1986. GA and affiliated companies operate on five continents and include GA Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI).

GA-ASI produces a series of unmanned aircraft and provides electro-optical, radar, signals intelligence, and automated airborne surveillance systems. GA’s Electromagnetic Systems Division produces electro-magnetic aircraft launch and recovery systems for the US Navy, satellite surveillance, electro-magnetic rail gun, high power laser, hypervelocity projectile, and power conversion systems.


WHAT IS THE GRAY EAGLE EXTENDED RANGE?

Gray Eagle Extended Range (GE-ER) Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) is a next-generation advanced derivative of the battle-proven Gray Eagle Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS). GE-ER delivers long-endurance UAS surveillance, communications relay, and weapons delivery missions in support of the warfighter. The aircraft delivers an advanced UAS capability for the Army, adding significantly increased endurance, considerably improved reliability/maintainability, and much greater payload and weapons capacity. The Gray Eagle is a multi-mission UAS and carries sensors including color and thermographic cameras, and is piloted remotely from a ground-control station via satellite data link or optionally by line-of-sight data link.


 

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

The Gray Eagle-Extended Range is a multi-mission UAS including surveillance and other intelligence gathering. The air vehicle carries sensors including color and thermographic cameras and is piloted remotely from a ground-control station via satellite data link or optionally by a line-of-sight data link. 

An early goal of the software modernization sought to integrate a new and advanced video codec implemented on the Zynq UltraScale+ adaptable multiprocessor system on chip (MPSoC) from Xilinx, Inc. 
The desire to provide a path to future certification led the customer to think about a mixed criticality environment including both Linux and a deterministic real-time operating system. 

 

WHAT CHALLENGES WERE BEING FACED?

Given the nature of the use case, there was a need for a software implementation that would securely partition networking, security, safety, and multimedia domains from each other with prescriptive, defined, and immutable allocation of hardware resources to each. This was important since it would allow the incorporation of the Xilinx hardware without compromising hardware dependencies or the performance and determinism of other time-critical processes.

WHY WAS LYNX SELECTED?

After a customer review, they determined that LYNX MOSA.ic was the best path to incorporate purpose-dedicated software enclaves each with operations and access restricted to their precise need. The benchmarking work also revealed that the secure, low latency inter-process communication enabled in the LYNX MOSA.ic would meet their real-time response requirements.

WHAT IS LYNX MOSA.IC?

LYNX MOSA.ic is a software framework for building and integrating complex multi-core safety- or security-critical systems using independent application modules. Its elegant, modular architecture enables developers to collapse development cycles when creating, certifying, and deploying robust platforms for manned and autonomous and increasingly connected systems.

LEARN MORE