Air mobility company, AEROFUGIA, and RTOS developer, SYSGO, are to jointly work on an avionics platform for AEROFUGIA’s AE200-100 electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft programme.
The collaboration will address one of the key engineering challenges facing the eVTOL industry: Consolidating a growing number of safety-critical and mixed-criticality functions onto powerful computing platforms while maintaining the isolation, deterministic behaviour and certification readiness required for commercial aviation.
The AE200-100 programme addresses this challenge through a partitioned avionics architecture based on ARMv8 technology and SYSGO’s PikeOS real-time operating system and hypervisor. The architecture enables applications with different levels of criticality to coexist on shared computing resources while maintaining strict spatial and temporal separation.
By consolidating functions that would traditionally require multiple dedicated computing units, the approach can reduce size, weight, power consumption and cost (SWaP-C), while establishing a scalable software foundation for future aircraft development.
“For the next generation of eVTOL aircraft, certification cannot be treated as something that happens after the architecture has been designed. It has to be considered from the beginning,” said Alex Tu, Chief of Production at AEROFUGIA.
Modern eVTOL aircraft must integrate flight control, electric propulsion, battery management, navigation, communications and health monitoring within increasingly compact computing environments. As more functions are consolidated, demonstrating their independence becomes a fundamental architectural and certification challenge.
Partitioned architectures based on concepts such as ARINC 653 enable applications of different criticality levels to share computing resources while maintaining defined temporal and spatial boundaries.
PikeOS combines a hard real-time operating system with separation-kernel and hypervisor functionality. This enables multiple applications and operating environments to execute independently on a common hardware platform and provides an architectural foundation for systems targeting high software assurance levels under DO-178C, including Design Assurance Level A (DAL A).
“AEROFUGIA demonstrates where the eVTOL industry is heading: More functionality and greater software complexity consolidated onto fewer computing platforms,” said Christopher Hohenberg, Project Manager at SYSGO. “The decisive factor is no longer simply processing performance, but an architecture that makes consolidation manageable and certification achievable. With PikeOS, we bring decades of safety-critical software and certification experience to a new generation of commercial aircraft.”
