Wind River VxWorks 61508 Platform delivers the stringent foundation industrial and medical companies need to address the aspects of safety-critical applications. Wind River VxWorks 61508 Platform enables VxWorks developers access to Wind River's commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platform for delivering applications that must be certified to the requirements of IEC 61508 (functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems [E/E/PES]) and other related software standards. Offering complete IEC 61508 certification evidence, the platform is based on Wind River's industry-leading VxWorks 6.x operating system and backed by 25 years of device software experience, a broad network of hardware and software partners, a world-class support organization, and a specialized professional services team.
Key Features and Functionality
- VxWorks API conformance: VxWorks 61508 Platform is based on VxWorks 6.6 and includes a certified subset of the VxWorks 6.6 API, which consists of more than 270 API calls. These API calls were selected to ensure that VxWorks 61508 Platform is fully deterministic and testable under guidelines outlined in the IEC 61508 safety standards. The VxWorks 61508 Platform API includes substantial functionality, including cache, clock, event flag, interrupt, memory management, message queue, ring buffer, semaphore, signal, and task management calls, along with a wide array of C library functions.
- IEC 61508 SIL 3 certification evidence: Once development is complete, Wind River's certification evidence DVD can be used to build and test the final software system for certification. VxWorks 61508 Platform is certified to SIL 3. The DVD contains the TÜV certificate for VxWorks 61508 Platform and all required source, binary, and documentation to support IEC 61508-Part 3 SIL 3, SIL 2, or SIL 1 certification of the operating system. The certification evidence DVD also contains the Safety Manual for VxWorks 61508 Platform. The certification evidence is delivered as a complete package on a DVD in an advanced, hyperlinked format for easy navigation and traceability, an advantage over systems that require expensive, time-consuming certification services. This certification evidence can also be leveraged in related IEC 61508 safety certification efforts, for example, the CENELEC 50128 (European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization) railway application standards or equivalent standards in the medical and energy industries.
- Wind River Workbench development suite: VxWorks 61508 Platform includes the award-winning Wind River Workbench development suite. Wind River Workbench is an Eclipse-based collection of tools designed to accelerate time-to-market for developers building devices with VxWorks real-time operating systems. From hardware and board initialization to application development, Workbench offers deep capability across the development process in a single integrated environment, with complete platform integration, including powerful tools for debugging, code analysis, and test. Based on the Eclipse framework, Workbench can be extended through in-house, third-party, open source, and commercial plug-ins. In addition to the Workbench Eclipse-based environment, VxWorks 61508 Platform provides a full-featured command-line build system and debugging tools for developers who prefer this type of environment. These command-line tools can be easily integrated into a customized build system. The Workbench development environment helps reduce development costs, helps manage code complexity, eases tool integration, and enables standardization on a common development foundation across the enterprise.
- Wind River Network Stack: Wind River Network Stack for VxWorks 61508 is an optional embedded TCP/UDP/IPv4 network stack that can be used in conjunction with VxWorks 61508 Platform. Like all Wind River IEC 61508 certification products, Network Stack for VxWorks 61508 is certified to SIL 3 and has a complete DVD of certification evidence that includes the Safety Manual for VxWorks 61508 Platform. This network stack uses APIs from Wind River's networking stack and supports the BSD sockets API (datagram, stream, and raw sockets), enabling the easy migration of networking software from VxWorks and Linux platforms.
- Extensive partner ecosystem: To ensure a complete range of integrated technologies, Wind River has established the Device Software Optimization (DSO) industry's widest-ranging partner ecosystem, joining forces with leading hardware and software providers to address such technologies as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) boards, system modeling tools, control design tools, test tools, certification services with direct interface to certification authorities as TÜV, and platform simulation applications.
Supported Host Operating Systems
- Windows XP, Windows Vista
- Solaris 9, Solaris 10
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Workstation 4 and 5
- Red Hat Fedora 9
- OpenSUSE Linux 10.2 and 11
Note: Because VxWorks 61508 Platform is based on VxWorks 6.6, VxWorks 6.6 BSPs can be retargeted for VxWorks 61508 Platform. This requires reworking the BSP so that it only uses VxWorks 61508 API calls, which are a subset of the VxWorks 6.6 API calls. Contact your local Wind River account manager for details.
