The engineers employed by Rockwell Collins include highly-skilled experts in the design of advanced avionics for commercial aircraft. So when a new Rockwell avionics project was on a tight schedule, it didn't make sense for those engineers to spend their valuable time performing the tangential but necessary work, such as bringing up the real-time operating system and writing device drivers for the Ethernet controller and flash file system.

Time is money

An engineering manager at Rockwell thus engaged several members of the Netrino engineering team to assist with these necessary side tasks, on a time-and-materials basis. As device driver and real-time operating system specialists, Netrino's engineers were able to do this work more quickly than Rockwell's own staff. More importantly, the outside help freed the internal Rockwell team to advance their avionics-related software in the limited calendar time.

Netrino was specifically tasked to port the µC/OS-II real-time operating system, µC/FS flash file system, µC/TCP-IP protocol stack, and other third-party software to Rockwell's proprietary avionics electronics. With the delegation of the low-level software drivers and board support package to Netrino in place, Rockwell's engineers were able to immediately begin working on their avionics application software. Then, as the port of each third-party software component was completed by Netrino, the Rockwell engineering team made it part of their software build.

Quick turnaround

Faced with a short deadline and lots of work to be done, the engineering manager at Rockwell smartly recognized the value of parallelizing parts of the firmware development to reduce the new product's time to market. By dividing the work to be done into avionics application software and tangential low-level hardware integration code, Rockwell was able to achieve its goal of moving the new product line forward on an aggressive schedule. In this way, Netrino helped shave several calendar months off Rockwell's new product development.

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