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Aircraft embedded systems have very long lifetimes. I heard a story from one of the Cal Berkeley EE/CS faculty about how Boeing and Airbus stockpile microproce
by hodgesrm 10y ago
Aircraft embedded systems have very long lifetimes. I heard a story from one of the Cal Berkeley EE/CS faculty about how Boeing and Airbus stockpile microprocessors for critical systems on major aircraft programs so that they can continue to deliver without redoing FAA certifications for decades. I believe they even store them in super-cooled environments to keep the hardware from degrading. (Sorry no source but it was a very interesting talk.)
- a3n 10y agoA former employer did something similar, for complete motherboards and a few things like power supplies.
- hodgesrm 10y agoApparently this a common practice, then. In the aviation case the problem seems to be that critical avionics components like fly-by-wire control systems are real-time systems in which correct behavior depends not only on hardware interfaces but also temporal properties like response time. Upgrading to new hardware would potentially break the software in difficult-to-predict ways.