Lockheed Martin Selects LynuxWorks LynxOS RTOS for UK AWACS

LynuxWorks, Inc. announced that the Mission Systems and Sensors Division (MS2) of Lockheed Martin in Owego, NY, has selected the LynxOS real-time operating system (RTOS) and Luminosity Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for use in conjunction with the United Kingdom (UK) Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). 


The UK’s AWACS aircraft were designed to provide an airborne early warning capability by tracking aircraft at extended ranges. The AWACS has become invaluable for airborne command and control and their ability to relay vital information to commanders on the ground. 


According to Robert Day, VP of Marketing at LynuxWorks, “In recent years, LynuxWorks software has been selected for a growing list of current and next-generation aircraft. This is one more example of LynxOS’ strength to meet demanding security and mission-critical software requirements.” 

The result of 21 years of RTOS experience, only LynxOS combines hard real-time embedded technology with broad conformance to open and de facto standards like Linux, POSIX and UNIX. All operating system components within LynxOS are designed for absolute determinism -- hard real-time performance. This means that they absolutely must respond within a known period of time. This predictable response is ensured even in the presence of heavy I/O due to the kernel’s unique threading model, enabling interrupt routines to be extremely short and fast. 


LynxOS also exhibits true linear scalability, so that it stays unwaveringly deterministic even as the tasks it performs increase massively. And this determinism extends to networking applications, which can stay responsive even in the face of the most complex demands.

LynxOS includes the latest version of the Luminosity IDE offering powerful development, debug and analysis tools integrated into an industry standard Eclipse-based framework for maximum interoperability. Designed to accelerate time-to-market for embedded system developers, Luminosity provides a fast and easy way to create, edit, compile, manage, debug and profile C/C++ embedded and real-time applications as well as effectively build and debug kernel downloadable images from configurable LynuxWorks operating systems. 

LynuxWorks’ mission-critical operating systems including LynxOS and the safety certified LynxOS-178 currently run in more than one million embedded applications. LynxOS and LynxOS-178 offer the most secure, reliable design of any commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) embedded operating system and with their POSIX API are the most open, hard RTOS available. Furthermore, LynxOS-178 is the only time- and space-partitioned RTOS that has been awarded the FAA Reusable Software Component (RSC) certification and targets both the Intel x86 and PowerPC platforms.