Earlier in November I was speaking as part of a track on cybersecurity at (Virtual) Electronica, a tradeshow held every two years in Munich. One of the questions related to when open source hypervisors will appear at the heart of mission critical systems. Mission critical systems are those that simply have to work all the time in a predictable way. Relevant applications include avionics, rail infrastructure, self- driving vehicles.

Lynx Software Technologies was invited, along with Mercury Systems (a partner), to participate in a webinar sponsored by Intel that focused on harnessing multicore processors for use in mission critical avionics platforms.

During the webinar, Intel announced they were licensing a Flight Safety Evidence Package for the Intel C3708 processor (I still have to use the brand names though….this is Denverton!). This package was developed to support Lockheed Martin’s certification efforts for the F-35 joint strike fighter and have been one of the primary programs that has generated a great working relationship over the last few years between the two companies. A great Intel Solution Brief is located here if you need additional information.

Across a range of industries, there is a broad understanding that the deployment of modern computing resources with cloud native models of software lifecycle management will become ever more pervasive. Placing virtualized computing resources nearer to where multiple streams of data are created is well established. It is the path to address system latency, privacy, cost and resiliency challenges that a pure cloud computing approach cannot address.

A number of our recent customer design wins have been where Lynx Software Technologies has ousted competitors from prior versions of those products. We were not in the prior versions of the Joint Strike Fighter prior to the Technical Refresh (“TR3). With another large customer decision cycle making their way through the elimination of a wider set of alternatives and recently casting out a recognized incumbent, my mind turned to thoughts of disruption.

One of the regular topics on LinkedIn and, indeed, in business topics, is about the need for small businesses to focus. I have always struggled with this over my career. In the should-be-post-COVID-19 era, this is really challenging for us… but arguably in a good way!

In May 2020, I wrote a couple of blogs about what we were starting to hear about in terms of use cases for our separation kernel hypervisor, LynxSecure, in Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. I thought it about time to provide a short update. As I mentioned previously, Lynx has a long history focused on accelerating and cost reducing the path that customers create, certify and deploy mission critical avionics’ systems. We have a set of artifacts in place that customers can reuse to simplify system certification processes etc. According to research by Rockwell Collins, DO-178C DAL A requirements represent a superset of industry specific certifications such as ISO 26262, IEC 61508 and similar certifications. As a result, we felt that Lynx could apply its extensive avionics experience and certifications into additional markets.