CERTON Engineering, the leader in safety-critical certification solutions for aerospace, medical and transportation FPGA hardware, is partnered with Altera, now the Intel® Programmable Solutions Group, to provide DO-254 compliant certification packages of their COTS IP 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.

Aerospace, Medical and Transportation markets are growing at an increasingly fast rate. The rapid growth within these markets has accelerated the need for timely, thorough, and effective safety certification. Expansion in unmanned aircraft systems, self-driving automobiles, and other new logic-driven functionality will expand the need for safety certification of electronic components.

With FPGAs and SoC emerging in these applications, developers are increasingly reliant on complex Intellectual Property (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," said 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 currently 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.

Sales Director Justin Bragan of CERTON added, "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".