[lbriner]

If you mean physically bigger than it is certainly true that avionics, like automative, uses larger components with higher ratings and avoids a lot of high pitch integrated circuits. This makes things easier test and likely to be more reliable. It also means you might have a single euro-card just to handle the input from a single airplane sensor even though in the non safety-critical world, we would easily mux them onto a single interface.

[RL_Quine]

Like in medical gear, avionics also has a lot of redundancy and "useless" circuitry to allow for assurances. I've opened some hardware designed for unsafe environments that was absolutely packed with fuses, for seemingly no purpose other than to assert that limits were being followed in the design. I don't imagine avionics is any different, but I've only seen the inside of 60s-70s aircraft gear.

[jareklupinski]

I love the hardware/software analogy of a fuse to an assert statement; going to remember that while writing tests :)