Aerospace, space, defense, and other industries with high reliability requirements inherently face systemic supply chain risks.

This is due to the way critical systems are designed and built. To operate reliably in the harsh environments our industries build for, all vendors today are left to pick the few best part that satisfy the reliability, safety, and robustness requirements.

In reality, most vendors today are constrained to cherry-pick parts from few qualified suppliers and even fewer specialized chip designers that are assumed to not fail and behave correctly, and then build a computer system that works assuming nothing unforeseen happens. In reality, you as a vendor are now locked to a very small set of approved electronic components, each supplied by a single vendor, a single fabrication node, often from a single country.

This Supply Chain Issue is systemic and common to all critical industries.

Long lead times, freshly changed or surprisingly formulated import restrictions in your region, new export restrictions on your supplier side, obsolescence, fabrication shutdowns, conflicts, and other geopolitical disruptions will essential components unavailable for years. This has happened several times already in the past years, due to pandemics, due to war, due to geopolitical struggles for national supremacy. You as vendor will have to cope with this systemic issue.

In many programs, the system architecture itself prevents substitution, forcing redesign, recertification, or program delays.

Fox2Space solves this problem by providing core avionics technologies that make computerized systems inherently independent from requiring one specific electronic part that can not be replaced without a redesign.

Our technologies and our platforms enable both new and existing systems to operate reliably across changing hardware environments, and enables you to adapt your solutions to changing.

Unlocks the COTS-Part Universe

Fox2Space offers fault-tolerant onboard computing and control technologies designed to function correctly even when built from different, interchangeable, or widely available electronic components.

Instead of designing a system around ideal parts with that are assumed to never fail until they do, Fox2Space’s technologies enables our clients to build systems that can adapt to damage and failure. This allows our clients to also utilize parts that are imperfect but available freely and in massive quantities.

The enabling technologies are collectively referred to as Adaptive Avionics, and Integrating this technologies enables our clients to unlock the use of:

• Alternative parts during shortages
• Substitute parts manufactured in different semiconductor technology nodes
• Commercial off-the-shelf components in critical applications
• Newly introduced devices or alternative supplier parts
• Widely available electronics under crisis conditions in place of quantity constrained specialized single-vendor parts

All this while still meeting and exceeding ALL the strict reliability requirements imposed on space, defense, and other critical applications.

This capability is not achieved through process changes, system redesign, hope or consulting. It is achieved through Fox2Space avionics technology integrated into the system architecture.

Adapt to the Actual Supply Chain Reality

Traditional high-rel computer systems are built inside a restricted ecosystem:

• Only a few approved components may be used
• Each component requires long qualification cycles
• Replacement parts require re-design
• Obsolescence therefore forces costly re-engineering and re-validation
• Supply disruptions directly stop production
• This creates dependency on specific suppliers that cannot always be maintained.

Fox2Space technology allows systems to break out of this walled garden.

With Adaptive Avionics, the system no longer depends on a specific piece of silicon, it depends on functional behavior, not vendor identity. The same control system can operate on different hardware and assumes that all its constituent parts are imperfect with precautions in place to step in for WHEN not IF failure occurs.

Fox2Space technologies were developed under conditions where essential required components frequently and unpredictably became unavailable and conventional avionics approaches could not deliver working systems.

When deploying Adaptive Avionics on a client’s systems, designers are given the freedom to assume that:

• Parts may fail
• Parts may become unavailable and replacements may be imperfect
• Suppliers and product lines may change even for complex ICs
• Qualification time is drastically shortened
• The use of export controlled parts can be minimized or avoided if desired
• New widely used common ICs manufactured in bulk may be used freely

This makes Adaptive Avionics especially suited for:

• Space systems
• Defense platforms
• UAVs and autonomous systems
• Automotive safety systems
• Mass-manufactured long-lifetime infrastructure
• Industrial control systems
• Programs exposed to geopolitical risk and rapidly changing export regimes

If your system depends on parts that may become unavailable, your system design may be perfect, but your solution it represents is not reliable and not sustainable.

Fox2Space enables computerized systems that remain buildable, maintainable, and operable even when the supply chain changes, and when all your competitors long ago ceased to manufacture.