CERTON provides DO-254 COTS safety-certification packages for commercial and military aerospace

MELBOURNE, Fla., 3 June 2016. CERTON Engineering, provider of safety-critical certification solutions for aerospace FPGA hardware in Melbourne, Florida, and the Intel Programmable Solutions Group (PSG, formerly Altera Corp.) in San Jose, California, to provide DO-254-compliant certification packages of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), intellectual property (IP) field-programmable gate array (FPGA) cores.

CERTON, as part of the relationship, has direct access to vendor IP designs and tool qualifications supporting certification as required by the FAA and other regulatory agencies.

The aerospace market is growing at an increasingly fast rate, and the rapid growth within these markets has accelerated the need for timely, thorough, and effective safety certification, CERTON officials explain. Expansion in unmanned aircraft systems, self-driving automobiles, and other new logic-driven functionality will expand the need for safety certification of electronic components, they add.

With FPGAs and systems on a chip (SoCs) emerging in these applications, developers are increasingly reliant on complex IP provided by the FPGA vendor to implement robust designs.

"Access to this IP provides us with the ability to produce artifacts necessary for DO-254 certification," describes CERTON Engineering Director Wallace Everest. "The overall result is reduced cost, reduced risk, and reduced time to market. It allows system developers to purchase complex COTS IP with confidence they can meet strict and evolving regulatory standards."

CERTON is generating a qualification package library for the most commonly used Altera IP with more complex components to be added later, each tailored to a customer’s application-specific environment.

"The collaboration provides a powerful combination of silicon, tools, and CERTON’s experience in all phases of systems, software, and complex hardware product life cycles," says Sales Director Justin Bragan of CERTON.

CERTON provides safety‑critical certification solutions to the aerospace, medical device, and transportation industries. CERTON has internally developed tools and exclusive technology designed to streamline approvals of safety-critical systems, software, and complex hardware. These competitive advantages allow CERTON to minimize the time-to-market of customer products while providing a Firm‑Fixed Cost to its customers. CERTON provides expertise in all phases of systems, software, and complex hardware product design life cycles to support rapid approval of safety-critical customer products.