New safety critical radio altimeter for Airbus and related design flow

The latest generation of the ERT560 digital radioaltimeter (DRA) developed for the Airbus A380 is the result of Thales' 40 years experience. Over 40,000 radioaltimeters have been produced over that period based on dual technology, meeting the stringent requirements of the civil aircraft. This new version takes advantages of the FPGA technology to implement the main treatment of the equipment. The present article introduces the main capabilities of the ERT560 product and focus on the FPGA which is the key element of the safety critical analysis of the radioaltimeter. Then the paper presents the application of the new "design assurance guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware (DO254) which has been raised in 2000 (this guide is the equivalent for the HW of the DO 178B for the SW). DO254 related activities are mainly developed such as a dedicated workflow, validation (give evidence of the completeness and correctness of all design life cycle outputs) and verification (evaluation of an implementation of requirements to determine that they have been met) and also verification tool qualification