The Challenge
In safety-critical fields, such as avionics, defense, medical, industrial, and others, the importance of graphics goes well beyond the user experience. Some safety-critical environments present even bigger challenges for designers of embedded systems. The constraints of performance, and system and life cycle cost come into play. In space-borne applications, radiation tolerance is mandatory, while in defense and commercial applications size, weight and power (SWaP) are optimized along with minimizing hardware obsolescence. These requirements make the use of many commercial-grade hardware graphics processor units (GPUs) less attractive, or even infeasible in some cases.
IGL – An Efficient, OpenGL® Safety-critical Software Renderer
ENSCO Avionics’ IGL® product features both high-performance and high quality rendering tailored to efficiently present graphics in embedded systems.
IGL offers application developers a platform-independent, scalable solution for embedded graphics that supports both accelerated and non-accelerated graphics subsystems with a single, consistent, cost-effective API.
IGL is developed for graphics rendering in environments without a GPU. It communicates directly with a frame buffer attached to a hardware display port, i.e., VGA, XVGA, DVI, HDMI, etc., and features extremely fast and efficient performance with low size, weight, and power requirements. IGL implements the industry standard OpenGL® SC (safety-critical) standard, allowing many OpenGL-based applications to use it. IGL has no dependencies on other tools and can be used in conjunction with any application in which the OpenGL output conforms to the Khronos SC 1.0 standard.