SYSGO

Last updated
SYSGO GmbH
Type Subsidiary
Founded1991
Headquarters Mainz, Germany
Key people
Etienne Butery (CEO), Jürgen Hettich (COO)
Products ELinOS, PikeOS
Parent Thales Group

SYSGO GmbH is a German information technologies company that supplies operating systems and services for embedded systems with high safety and security-related requirements, using Linux. For security-critical applications, the company offers the Hypervisor and RTOS PikeOS, an operating system for multicore processors and the foundation for intelligent devices in the Internet of Things (IoT).

Contents

As an operating system manufacturer provider, SYSGO supports companies with the formal certification of software to international standards for safety and security in markets such as aerospace and defence, industrial automation, automotive, railway, medical as well as network infrastructure. SYSGO participates in a variety of international research projects and standardisation initiatives in the area of safety and security.

History

SYSGO was founded in 1991. On the initiative of company founder Knut Degen, the company specialized in the use of Linux-based operating systems in embedded applications. In the 1990s, SYSGO worked mainly with LynxOS. In 1999, the company launched the first product of its own, a development environment for Linux-based embedded applications by the name of ELinOS.

SYSGO introduced the first version of its PikeOS real-time operating system in 2005. With hypervisor functionality integrated into its basic structure, this operating system allows multiple embedded applications with different functional safety requirements to be operated on the same processor. The current version of PikeOS can run safety-critical applications for aerospace, automotive, rail and other industrial applications.

2009 saw the market launch of a software-only implementation of an AFDX stack (Avionics Full DupleX Switched Ethernet) for Safety-Critical Ethernet in accordance with ARINC-664 Part 7, which was certified to DO-178B. In 2013, SYSGO also achieved SIL 4 certification on multicore processors for EN 50128, a European standard for safety-relevant software used in railway applications.

The first subsidiary of the company was established in Ulm in 1997, followed by Prague (2004), Paris (2005) and Rostock (2008). In 2012, SYSGO was taken over by the Thales Group of France. In 2019 SYSGO built its new headquarters in Klein-Winternheim, near Mainz and moved in by April 2020.

Products and services

SYSGO's best-known product is PikeOS, a real-time operating system with a separation kernel-based Hypervisor, which provides multiple partitions for a variety of other operating systems and equips them with time schedules.

Other products include:

The PikeOS Hypervisor forms a foundation for critical systems in which both safety and security have to be ensured. The company also offers various certification kits. These certification kits include, for example, support documentation for development and testing and, if necessary, additional safety and security information to allow the development of standards-compliant systems.

Research

SYSGO is the technical lead for the EU research project certMILS. The goal of certMILS is primarily to make a certified European MILS platform available, and thus simplify the certification of composite IT systems. The project is supported by the EU as part of the Horizon 2020 programme.

Customers and partner network

Customers include companies that are working i.a. on solutions for the Internet of Things; especially suppliers and manufacturers in the areas aerospace and defence, automotive, railway and industrial sectors who have high safety and security requirements for their applications.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VxWorks</span> Real-time operating system

VxWorks is a real-time operating system developed as proprietary software by Wind River Systems, a subsidiary of Aptiv. First released in 1987, VxWorks is designed for use in embedded systems requiring real-time, deterministic performance and, in many cases, safety and security certification for industries such as aerospace, defense, medical devices, industrial equipment, robotics, energy, transportation, network infrastructure, automotive, and consumer electronics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Embedded operating system</span> Type of computer operating system

An embedded operating system is an operating system for embedded computer systems. Embedded operating systems are a computer system designed to increase functionality and reliability for achieving a specific task. Depending on the method used for Computer multitasking, this type of operating system might be considered a real-time operating system (RTOS).

Enea AB is a global information technology company with its headquarters in Kista, Sweden that provides real-time operating systems and consulting services. Enea, which is an abbreviation of Engmans Elektronik Aktiebolag, also produces the OSE operating system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MontaVista</span> Software company

MontaVista Software is a company that develops embedded Linux system software, development tools, and related software. Its products are made for other corporations developing embedded systems such as automotive electronics, communications equipment, mobile phones, and other electronic devices and infrastructure.

A vehicle bus is a specialized internal communications network that interconnects components inside a vehicle. In electronics, a bus is simply a device that connects multiple electrical or electronic devices together. Special requirements for vehicle control such as assurance of message delivery, of non-conflicting messages, of minimum time of delivery, of low cost, and of EMF noise resilience, as well as redundant routing and other characteristics mandate the use of less common networking protocols. Protocols include Controller Area Network (CAN), Local Interconnect Network (LIN) and others. Conventional computer networking technologies are rarely used, except in aircraft, where implementations of the ARINC 664 such as the Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet are used. Aircraft that use AFDX include the B787, the A400M and the A380. Trains commonly use Ethernet Consist Network (ECN). All cars sold in the United States since 1996 are required to have an On-Board Diagnostics connector, for access to the car's electronic controllers.

Nucleus RTOS is a real-time operating system (RTOS) produced by the Embedded Software Division of Mentor Graphics, a Siemens Business, supporting 32- and 64-bit embedded system platforms. The operating system (OS) is designed for real-time embedded systems for medical, industrial, consumer, aerospace, and Internet of things (IoT) uses. Nucleus was released first in 1993. The latest version is 3.x, and includes features such as power management, process model, 64-bit support, safety certification, and support for heterogeneous computing multi-core system on a chip (SOCs) processors.

A hypervisor is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called a host machine, and each virtual machine is called a guest machine. The hypervisor presents the guest operating systems with a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of the guest operating systems. Unlike an emulator, the guest executes most instructions on the native hardware. Multiple instances of a variety of operating systems may share the virtualized hardware resources: for example, Linux, Windows, and macOS instances can all run on a single physical x86 machine. This contrasts with operating-system–level virtualization, where all instances must share a single kernel, though the guest operating systems can differ in user space, such as different Linux distributions with the same kernel.

Aeronautical Radio, Incorporated (ARINC), established in 1929, was a major provider of transport communications and systems engineering solutions for eight industries: aviation, airports, defense, government, healthcare, networks, security, and transportation. ARINC had installed computer data networks in police cars and railroad cars and also maintains the standards for line-replaceable units.

Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX), also ARINC 664, is a data network, patented by international aircraft manufacturer Airbus, for safety-critical applications that utilizes dedicated bandwidth while providing deterministic quality of service (QoS). AFDX is a worldwide registered trademark by Airbus. The AFDX data network is based on Ethernet technology using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. The AFDX data network is a specific implementation of ARINC Specification 664 Part 7, a profiled version of an IEEE 802.3 network per parts 1 & 2, which defines how commercial off-the-shelf networking components will be used for future generation Aircraft Data Networks (ADN). The six primary aspects of an AFDX data network include full duplex, redundancy, determinism, high speed performance, switched and profiled network.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PikeOS</span> Real-time operating system

PikeOS is a commercial, hard real-time operating system (RTOS) that offers a separation kernel based hypervisor with multiple logical partition types for many other operating systems (OS), each called a GuestOS, and applications. It enables users to build certifiable smart devices for the Internet of things (IoT) according to the high quality, safety and security standards of different industries. For safety and security, critical real-time applications on controller-based systems without memory management unit (MMU) but with memory protection unit (MPU) PikeOS for MPU is available.

Integrated modular avionics (IMA) are real-time computer network airborne systems. This network consists of a number of computing modules capable of supporting numerous applications of differing criticality levels.

Multiple Independent Levels of Security/Safety (MILS) is a high-assurance security architecture based on the concepts of separation and controlled information flow. It is implemented by separation mechanisms that support both untrusted and trustworthy components; ensuring that the total security solution is non-bypassable, evaluatable, always invoked, and tamperproof.

Lynx Software Technologies, Inc. is a San Jose, California software company founded in 1988. Lynx specializes in secure virtualization and open, reliable, certifiable real-time operating systems (RTOSes). Originally known as Lynx Real-Time Systems, the company changed its name to LynuxWorks in 2000 after acquiring, and merging with, ISDCorp, an embedded systems company with a strong Linux background. In May 2014, the company changed its name to Lynx Software Technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ELinOS</span>

ELinOS is a commercial development environment for embedded Linux. It consists of a Linux distribution for the target embedded system and development tools for a development host computer. The development host computer usually is a standard desktop computer running Linux or Windows. The Linux system and the application software for the target device are both created on the development host.

LynxSecure is a least privilege real-time separation kernel hypervisor from Lynx Software Technologies designed for safety and security critical applications found in military, avionic, industrial, and automotive markets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XtratuM</span> Hypervisor

XtratuM is a bare-metal hypervisor specially designed for embedded real-time systems available for the instruction sets LEON2/3/4, ARM v7 and V8 processors and RISC V processor.

An embedded hypervisor is a hypervisor that supports the requirements of embedded systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LDRA</span> Software companies of the United Kingdom

LDRA is a provider of software analysis, and test and requirements traceability tools for the Public and Private sectors, and is a pioneer in static and dynamic software analysis.

DDC-I, Inc. is a privately held company providing software development of real-time operating systems, software development tools, and software services for safety-critical embedded applications, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. It was first created in 1985 as the Danish firm DDC International A/S, a commercial outgrowth of Dansk Datamatik Center, a Danish software research and development organization of the 1980s. The American subsidiary was created in 1986. For many years, the firm specialized in language compilers for the programming language Ada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyphal</span>

Cyphal is a lightweight protocol designed for reliable intra-vehicle communications using various communications transports, originally destined for CAN bus, but targeting various network types in subsequent revisions. OpenCyphal is an open-source project that aims to provide MIT-licensed implementations of the Cyphal protocol. The project was known as UAVCAN prior to rebranding in March 2022.

References