GE Aviation, in collaboration with GE Intelligent Platforms, announced today a new family of versatile computing platforms that reduce development time and cost for military and commercial aviation customers. The versatile computing platforms are a turn-key family of rugged, embedded computers. The platform is “application ready” with open architecture components and provides standard digital avionics interfaces.

Versatile computing platforms provide aircraft with a common software environment that enables customers to utilize the open system design to host a variety of vehicle and mission computing applications. 

“In new aircraft development programs, we've seen over time that the cost to develop software has become increasingly prohibitive. We needed to find a way to reduce development time and cost for our customers,” said Alan Caslavka, president of Avionics & Digital Systems for GE Aviation. “With a versatile computing platform, we have reset the avionics cost curve for escalating development programs to be affordable for the next civil and military vehicle.”

A versatile computing platform provides an aircraft with the high-performance computing resources and design assurance required to support a range of applications. The platform is capable of hosting various applications such as Vehicle Management, Mission Payload and Sensor Management, Utility Management, Navigation and Guidance, Communication Management and Aerial Refueling, while providing a common software environment for the aircraft's hosted applications. 

The versatile computing platform includes all of the software components necessary to fully support embedded avionics application software development. In addition, the components are designed to provide standard application program interfaces and a hardware abstraction layer in order to isolate the impact of future hardware modifications to the customer's application software, allowing low cost technology updates. The versatile computing platform is being designed to host Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) conformant applications for future aircraft.