The importance of the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) Initiative

Civil infrastructure systems such as electricity, oil, gas, water, sewage, transportation, communications, and healthcare are the main pillars of modern society. As these systems have evolved the software that runs them has increased in both feature-richness and complexity, and with that a unique ongoing challenge of maintaining systems expected to run at the highest degree of availability and reliability. Unlike most commercial products, infrastructure targeted product life cycles can span between 10 to 60 years requiring software components to have embedded oriented longevity, security and maintenance.

What is CIP™:

According to The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP™) Initiative, hosted by the Linux™ Foundation and driven by the world’s leading manufacturers of civil infrastructure systems: CIP™ “aims at providing a base layer – a set of industrial grade core open–source software components, tools and methods to create Linux™-based embedded systems that meet the requirements of modern societal infrastructure.”

Renesas, Toshiba, and Siemens are a few of the large corporations that have collaborated to define the requirements of and actively support the CIP™ initiative. According to them they seek to address the following challenges.

CIP™ main challenges includes attending:

Reliability
Functional Safety
Security
Real-time Automation and control

CIP™ attends the challenges by providing 3 main aspects:

Kernel with Super Long-Term Support (SLTS), 10 or more years
Activities for the Linux™ kernel with real-time capabilities
Automated kernel test environment

The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP™) project has five Working Groups – Security, Kernel, Testing, Software Update and CIP™ Core. Today more and more OEMs rely on CIP™ project ‘base layer’ reusable building blocks to meet reliability, safety, sustainability and other requirements of industrial and civil infrastructure.

Renesas is contributing to CIP activities through the development of Verified Linux Packages for RZ series.

To attend the Civil Infrastructure and Industrial project needs SolidRun expanded its partnership with Renesas to include CIP™ based System on modules (SoM) and Single board computers (SBC) products such as: RZ/V2L SoM , RZ/G2L SoM, RZ/G2UL SoM and RZ/G2LC SoM.