RTCA/DO-254 "Design Assurance Guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware" is a standard that is currently being enforced by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), European Aviation Safe Agency (EASA), Chinese Airworthiness Authority of Certification (CAAC), Transport Canada, and other worldwide aviation certification agencies. The purpose of DO-254 is to ensure the safety of in-flight hardware. Verification, which in a DO-254 context includes test, should be performed at all key stages of design - from conceptual analysis to in-system test. Verification tests and results should tie back to device requirements to ensure that all requirements have been thoroughly verified.
It is generally easier and more cost-effective to verify as early as possible in the design process. However, this means you are verifying a model of the design and not the actual hardware. It is essential in a DO-254 program to ensure that the physical device behaves identically to the thoroughly verified model. How to do this cost-effectively is one of the key challenges in today's DO-254 programs.
The RocketDrive enables thorough, DO-254 compliant verification that is reusable for both verifying the model and testing the actual hardware. This allows a user to quickly prove that the FPGA behaves the same as the model, and ensure that a thoroughly verified FPGA is passed along to the in-target phase of test. This is an easy-to-use, cost-effective approach that both accelerates and improves the overall verification process.