Conference announcements

Abstract

The presentation will cover:

• an explanation of what Barco Avionics's products are; this can be in the form of flyers and slides, or Ludovic might even bring a couple of actual avionics units to show them;
• Barco Avionics's history with Ada;
• the Ada coding standards that Ludovic wrote in 2005 taking into account the unique constraints imposed by avionics certification requirements.

Speaker

Ludovic Brenta has been programming computers on various operating systems and languages since 1990. He graduated from INSA Lyon in 1996 with a diploma in Production Engineering. Having written too many bugs in other languages, he became interested in Ada in 2001 and started learning the language by himself. In 2003, he volunteered to maintain the Ada packages in Debian GNU/Linux, and became an official Debian Developer in 2006. Currently, his day job is at Barco Avionics, where he participates in the development of safety-critical embedded software, using Ada. Ludovic has been living in Brussels, Belgium, since 1998.

Ludovic's GPG key fingerprint is
2349 9FA0 AE0D E2BA 9E18 560D C7D9 3025 9DFF AAD4

This announcement is also available as a PDF file.

More information

The slides of this presentation are available on-line here:
"Ada at Barco Avionics: history, coding standards, and products", June 2007 (Adobe Portable Document Format, pdf, 2296 KB).

Mini-report by a participant

On the 12th of June, Ludovic Brenta gave a very interesting talk to Ada-Belgium on the use of Ada at Barco.
Barco is a leading European supplier of displays and related technologies.
Ada is used in Barco's avionics products, predominantly cockpit display and control-display units.
As in all computing the processing power of these devices has risen and is now enough to support reasonable amount of software. Typically these devices contain some sort of display software, communications, exception logging and self test, though the latest devices have enough processing power to allow other applications to run in a time sharing configuration.
All of this must be certifiable to the prevailing standard - DO 178B - and almost all is written in Ada - a few lines of machine code and some C is used in some cases.
The requirements of certification were outlined and the resulting constraints on the development team were described.
Barco has developed a coding standard to enable certifiable software to be written and the rationale of the standard was explained.

To the Ada-Belgium home page. To the 2007 Ada-Belgium General Assembly Home Page.

Last update: 2007/06/15.