AdaCore today announced the continuing growth of its Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) support, through both the current availability of its GNAT Pro 17.1 Ada Development Environment for the Wind River FACE Certified VxWorks 653 Platform, and initiation of the FACE verification/certification process for GNAT Pro 17.1.

VxWorks 653 is the first Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) product to be certified as conformant to the FACE Technical Standard's Operating System Segment (OSS) Safety Base Profile. By using GNAT Pro on this platform, developers of embedded software can realize the benefits of Ada's high reliability together with the safety-critical support and ease of rapid component integration that come from VxWorks 653 and its FACE conformance.

GNAT Pro for VxWorks 653 includes a configurable run-time library facility that is targeted toward high-assurance applications. The "cert" run-time profile for VxWorks 653, which includes support for threading, exceptions, and (limited) dynamic allocation, has been used in airborne systems that have been certified to DO-178B Design Assurance Level (DAL) A.

"Wind River and AdaCore have a long history in providing software solutions to modern avionics projects," said Jamie Ayre, Commercial Director at AdaCore. “With the VxWorks 653 platform certified as FACE conformant, we look forward to continuing to offer the best-in-class software development tools for avionics applications taking advantage of the efficiencies of the FACE Technical Standard."

"Extending Wind River's certified FACE conformant COTS platform with a robust Ada runtime that is proven in multiple high-criticality environments is another proof point of our ongoing successful collaboration with AdaCore," stated Chip Downing, Senior Director of Aerospace and Defense at Wind River. "Both companies look forward to our continued efforts helping customers build highly configurable, standards-based, safety-critical solutions for global military platforms."

AdaCore has been actively participating in the FACE Consortium for the past five years, with the objective of ensuring that Ada's software engineering benefits are appropriately reflected in the Ada language profiles. With all internal testing and analysis showing that GNAT Pro supports the FACE OSS Ada language requirements, AdaCore has started working with an approved FACE Verification Authority (VA) to verify that GNAT Pro Ada meets the applicable FACE Technical Standard requirements for the Ada Language Runtime Safety and Security Profiles.