Safety-critical graphics is where a rendering bug is not a cosmetic annoyance. On a certified glass cockpit the wrong pixel at the wrong moment is a flight-safety problem, and the software has to prove it behaves the same way every time, under a standard like DO-178. We write graphics that run on constrained, certifiable, embedded hardware and hold up when the display is not allowed to fail.
Certifiable glass-cockpit rendering
We wrote a DO-178-style glass-cockpit rendering library for an experimental glass-panel avionics product, Avilution XFS. That means a rendering path you can actually defend to a certification authority: bounded, predictable behavior, no surprise allocations mid-frame, and a display that draws what it is told and nothing else.
OpenSceneGraph on embedded and mobile
We have ported OpenSceneGraph and osgEarth to iOS and to embedded hardware for aviation synthetic vision, so the same terrain engine that runs on a workstation runs in the aircraft. We have also ported OpenSceneGraph into automotive navigation and infotainment core toolkits, working with Altia on the rendering behind instrument clusters and in-vehicle displays.
Trustworthy from the silicon up
Getting graphics onto certifiable hardware often starts below the application, at the driver. Our friends and partners at Eagle Vision Embedded build safety-critical graphics drivers for Intel chipsets, and we work alongside them where the display stack has to be dependable from the silicon up, not just at the top of the application. And when the processor itself is bespoke, that is our RISC-V core work.
Hardware, from low-end boards to Jetson
We work across the embedded range, from low-end single-board computers to NVIDIA Jetson modules, fitting the renderer to the memory, the GPU, and the thermal and power budget the box actually has. Embedded is where you find out whether your graphics code was ever really efficient, because there is nowhere for waste to hide.
How it connects
This is the constrained-hardware end of our real-time 3D graphics, geospatial, , visual simulation, and Linux driver work: the same engines and terrain, made to fit and made to certify.
Who works on it
AlphaPixel is a US-owned small business, founded in 2004, with senior developers who each have 25-plus years in real-time 3D, embedded, and driver-level work. DLA DD2345 / ITAR registered. We take closed-source defense work and open source alike, and we do not sell a display, so our advice is not a sales pitch for one.
Talk to us
Tell us what you’re building and where it’s stuck. We’ll tell you straight whether it’s something we can help with, and how we’d approach it.
Or see how we run consulting and software development engagements.
