Deadline: 29-Sep-2026
The European Commission is now accepting applications to advance next-generation integrated modular avionics architectures and technologies for manned and unmanned military aerial platforms within a defence air cloud environment.
The initiative focuses on developing a Next Generation Military Integrated Modular Avionics (NG-MIMA) architecture, enhancing performance, safety, and cyber resilience, and integrating advanced hardware and software solutions including operating systems, middleware, system services, and frameworks. It prioritises modular and interoperable avionics architectures, reduced development cycles and costs, multi-level security data flow, real-time responsiveness, scalability within a system of systems, and demonstration of key performance indicators across diverse aerial platforms, contributing to the STEP objectives in defence technologies.
The indicative budget for this topic under the EDF-2026-DA call is EUR 25,000,000, forming part of an overall budget of EUR 422,000,000 allocated to the call. Eligible participants must be legal entities established in EU Member States, EDF-associated countries, or EEA countries, with executive management located in eligible countries and not controlled by non-associated third countries unless approved guarantees are provided.
New generation manned and unmanned military aerial platforms require enhanced integrated modular avionics capable of supporting advanced system architectures and integrating new avionics functions. These systems must meet strict military requirements in terms of processing, networking, interfaces, storage, power supply, safety, and cybersecurity. While civilian technology breakthroughs may be leveraged, dedicated solutions are necessary to address military-specific requirements such as size, weight, and power constraints, as well as secure and resilient data flows.
The project aims to increase the maturity of a system architecture for NG-MIMA and raise its technology readiness level to TRL 6. Proposals should include prototyping and integration activities to demonstrate proper internal integration across safety critical, mission critical, best effort, networking, and interoperability domains. A complete, platform-agnostic demonstrator should validate key requirements and performance indicators in a relevant environment.
Proposals must study, design, and develop a reference avionics architecture derived from previous IMA activities, integrate and prototype solutions to assess performance, safety, security, and interoperability, and demonstrate through representative KPIs that the architecture can be applied to various manned and unmanned aerial systems. At least one integrated prototype representative of an aerial system must be developed.
For more information, visit European Commission.
