Abstract
In modern aircraft cockpits, display units are used for human-computer interactions, such as Primary Flight Display (PFD). Development of these safety-critical units is liable to avionic standards such as DO-254, which must be satisfied for an aircraft’s electronic hardware. In this paper, we propose DO-254 compliant OpenGL Secure Library (SC) 1.1 implemented purely in Hardware Description Language (HDL) for graphical processing units used in aircraft: ASELGPU. ASELGPU is an FPGA-based, scalable, low-latency, fully parallel architecture that supports full OpenGL pipeline, including fixed-point vertex processing, rasterization, texture mapping, and frame buffering. Additionally, ASELGPU contains a highly efficient caching mechanism for texture mapping, and parallel rasterization for geometric primitives. Our architecture provides the generation of different kinds of avionics displays such as PFD, and 2D/3D map at high resolution and frame rates through various digital video interfaces such as Display Port, A818, and HD-SDI.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Eral, G., upon reasonable request.
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The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Aselsan, Turkey.
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Eral, G., Kılınç, C., Akkul, E.S. et al. ASELGPU: FPGA-based OpenGL SC compatible DO-254 certifiable graphics processor engine. SIViP 17, 1607–1613 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-022-02370-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-022-02370-5