An Interfacing Solution for Real-Time Avionics Development

Douglas Aircraft Company (DAC) of Long Beach, California, uses a real-time development environment, the avionics evaluation facility (AEF), to develop new avionics systems for the MD-11 aircraft. The development environment includes a host computer, input/output (I/O) software/hardware interface, and avionics system. The I/O interface developed at DAC, the interface microcomputer system (IMS), is a highly developed, flexible, practical, reliable, and sophisticated system for interfacing the host computer to the avionics system. This paper describes the IMS from its historical background to its present configuration in the AEF environment.