Esterel Technologies and National Instruments Provide Integrated Model-Based Development and Rapid Prototyping Solution for Mission and Safety-Critical Applications

National Instruments

Integrated Solution of Esterel SCADE Suite and National Instruments LabVIEW and LabVIEW Real-Time Enables Plant Modeling and Rapid Prototyping for Mission and Safety-Critical Application Developers

Elancourt France and Nürnberg, Germany — 26 February 2008

Esterel Technologies, the leading worldwide provider of model-based solutions for the development of mission and safety-critical systems has integrated its technology with the leading worldwide supplier of measurement and rapid prototyping solutions for embedded applications, National Instruments. This relationship and the resulting product integration give mission and safety-critical application developers the ability to simulate and measure the intended functionality and behaviour of their systems very early in the development process when design flaws are cheaper to fix. The companies have formed a partnership to offer an integrated model-based development environment that combines National Instrument’s LabVIEW® plant modeling solution with LabVIEW Real-Time rapid prototyping hardware and the Esterel SCADE Suite® design and development environment. This solution provides a complete workflow to developers, enabling realistic system simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and embedded rapid prototyping with complete production-quality code generation for mission and safety-critical applications.

The current manual methods of developing and testing mission and safety-critical applications under DO-178B, IEC 61508, or EN 50128 require tremendous amounts of manpower, time, energy, and ultimately money. This integrated solution reduces the cost of developing systems matching these demanding standards by enabling the developer to test their design concepts much earlier in the development process in near real-world situations. Ultimately, this solution facilitates the simulation and rapid prototyping of embedded software by providing near real-world stimuli acquired from any number of physical inputs to a deployed application on prototype hardware. From a workflow perspective, Esterel SCADE Suite users can automatically generate and deploy code from SCADE Suite models on National Instruments PXI and CompactRIO rapid prototyping hardware. These applications can then be subjected to stimuli to test their performance and behaviour.

The integrated solution is targeted at any mission or safety-critical application requiring certification. Typically, these types of applications are found in the aerospace (commercial and military), transportation, industrial, medical, and automotive industries.

The Esterel SCADE Suite and National Instruments LabVIEW integrated solution will be available in Q3 of 2008. Esterel Technologies and National Instruments continue to work with their clients to offer the best possible joint solution for mission and safety-critical application developers.

Our partnership with National Instruments helps our mutual customers bridge the gap between systems engineering and software engineering with embedded rapid prototyping, said Eric Bantegnie, President and CEO of Esterel. By providing the ability to utilize near real-world stimuli from LabVIEW directly in the SCADE Suite automatically generated application, software and test teams will be able to communicate better, analyze their systems more effectively, and correct design flaws more efficiently.

We have worked with Esterel SCADE models for several years so it is good to formalize our partnership using our I/O and the LabVIEW Simulation Interface Toolkit (SIT), said Tony Vento, VP of Applications Engineering at NI.

About LabVIEW and LabVIEW Real-Time

The graphical programming approach of LabVIEW and LabVIEW Real-Time make it easy for engineers to design real-time applications using a wide variety of I/O, hundreds of algorithms for signal processing, machine vision, control, file I/O and networking, and deploy them to a suite of RTOSs and off-the-shelf, real-time hardware devices. LabVIEW Real-Time also features an Execution Trace Toolkit for optimizing applications and meeting performance constraints as well as integration with the LabVIEW Simulation Interface Toolkit (SIT). The SIT gives control system design and test engineers a seamless link between LabVIEW, I/O, and simulation environments.

About Esterel SCADE Suite

Esterel SCADE, a design environment for safety-critical embedded software applications, provides graphical specification capture and simulation, along with the capability to check safety properties at the model level. It includes SCADE Suite® and SCADE Display™.

SCADE Suite® is the market leading, model-based development environment dedicated to safety-critical embedded software:

DO-178B qualified up to level A for Military and Aerospace Industries
IEC 61508 certified at SIL 3 by TÜV for Heavy Equipment, and Energy
EN 50128 certified at SIL 4 by TÜV for Rail Transportation

SCADE Display™ is the leading edge embedded graphics design environment dedicated to safety-critical display systems, DO-178B qualified up to level A for Military and Aerospace Industries.

About National Instruments

National Instruments (www.ni.com) is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 4,500 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries.

About Esterel Technologies

Esterel Technologies is the worldwide leader of model-based design, verification and code generation tools for mission and safety-critical embedded systems.

Esterel Technologies is a privately held company with headquarters in Elancourt, France and Mountain View, California, USA, with direct sales offices in Germany, the United Kingdom, and China. For additional information, visit the Esterel Technologies websites at www.esterel-technologies.com.

Press Contact:s

For Esterel Technologies :

Gundel Hahn

Phone : +49 (0) 89 123 922 04

Email : Gundel.Hahn@esterel-technologies.com

For National Instruments :

Rahman Jamal

Phone : +49 (0) 89 741313 0

Email : Rahman.Jamal@ni.com

LabVIEW is a trademark of National Instruments Corporation

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