Leveraging Driverless Car Investment in Next Generation Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA)

The market opportunity for driver assisted, driver piloted, and fully driverless cars is projected to reach 42 Billion by 2025. As a result, advanced "IMA like" automotive solutions are being explored and are focused on developing and maturing next generation transformational IMA technologies. Five future IMA dual use focus areas that have the potential to be transformational enablers for affordability, technology refresh, and new capabilities in both automotive and avionics IMA markets are: 1.) heterogeneous manycore processing, 2.) scalable autonomy and data fusion software components, 3.) hypervisor enabled mixed criticality software infrastructure, 4.) unified QoS networking, and 5.) Model Based Design (MBD). This paper builds on the authors' previous exploration into IMA dual use potential with these five specific roadmap focus areas analyzed for specific requirements, architecture alternatives being explored, potential payoff, and gaps requiring further research/development before successful mainstream insertion into avionics systems.