DO-254/ED-80 - An Application Guidelines to Redesign/Re-Engineering Airborne Electronic Hardware 2016-01-2039

Avionics industry is moving towards fly-by wire aircrafts with less reliance on mechanical systems leading to increase in the complexity of in-flight hardware elements. RTCA/DO-254 and EUROCAE ED-80 plays a vital role in the design assurance of airborne electronic hardware.

RTCA/ DO-254 and EUROCAE ED-80 are the industry standards for Design Assurance Guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware. The two different agencies FAA and EU regulate and apply this design assurance guidance to the regulatory law in CFR and EASA CS respectively. This paper discusses the need for DO-254 /ED-80 certification in Aerospace industry, the advantages and benefits to the avionics manufacturers. The paper presents the study made on similarities and differences between DO-254/ED-80. This paper simplifies the thin line of distinction on the classification of the product as a simple and complex hardware and also on the applicability of DO-254 for both simple and complex hardware based on FAA AC20-152, Order 8110.105 and EASA Certification Memo SWCEH- 001 for AEH.

DO-254 suggests to use compliant tools or to show the history of the tool being previously used for design, synthesis and simulation. This is a key factor for trade off analysis of FPGA/ASIC based design vs non FPGA/ASIC based design.

Due to the longevity of aircraft in commercial operation, avionics and aircraft systems need to be design to support a longer product life span. This makes component obsolescence, a challenge and forces products potentially go through redesign phase which may impact the design approval under DO-254/ED-80 an require updates and re-verification as well as the potential for re-certification. This paper provides some suggested guidance for taking credit from previous design DO-254/ED-80 baselines, which will help in reducing the recertification efforts. Discussion and thoughts are presented for leveraging the certification artifacts for current and future COTS, Hard IPs, Vendor COTS IPs and Soft IPs. This paper makes an attempt to show how to carry out an analysis on change impact assessment, applicability involved in various Development Assurance Levels against design/verification requirements.. Various pain points with respect to certification and reusability approach has been discussed Possible solutions to overcome areas of significant impact has been outlined in this paper.