July 2007
BAE Systems chooses ARTiSAN StudioBAE Systems Integrated System Technologies (Insyte) has chosen ARTiSAN Studio as its preferred tool for the implementation of its OMG SysML-based systems engineering processes. To prove the capabilities and benefits of ARTiSAN Studio and the potential application of OMG SysML within BAE Systems, a pilot project was undertaken in which ARTiSAN Studio was used to capture the design of an existing system. Following the success of this pilot, BAE Systems is now actively considering a variety of systems design and software development projects for the deployment of ARTiSAN Studio which is being made available to BAE Systems’ systems design engineers on the company’s network as part of its overall design environment.
ARTiSAN Studio provides complete support for the OMG SysML standard and incorporates a comprehensive SysML Profile that makes use of Studio’s Domain Specific Profiling capability. The SysML Profile supports the four pillars of OMG SysML – system requirements, behaviour, structure and parametric relationships. The ARTiSAN Studio SysML Profile directly supports core OMG SysML elements including blocks, item flows, ports and port flows, adding appropriate new commands, explorer panes and toolbars to the menus.
ARTiSAN Studio will enable BAE Systems to diagrammatically specify the nature of the systems it designs in terms of the system itself, its subsystems, parts and interfaces as well as its major states, its modes and the transitions between them. Furthermore, it will enable BAE Systems to define the activities the system performs and how the system is used. It will set out the requirements on the system, how they are satisfied and, finally, sets of parameters and constraints and the relationships between them.
Aonix Contributes UML Technology to Open Source
Aonix is contributing its Ameos modeling technology to the open source community. Ameos, based on the Software through Pictures modeling tool family, offers UML profiles to generate C/C++, Ada, Java, CORBA, COM, and EJB. Under the new open source policy, Ameos is available under terms based on the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) as OpenAmeos. This open source strategy for Ameos allows Aonix to focus marketing resources on its expanding PERC technologies for real-time Java developers, while providing the tools to ensure long-term value to Ameos users.
Ameos implements UML 2.0 profiles, model-driven architecture (MDA) -based model transformation and a modern, convenient user interface—features designed to powerfully meet the modeling needs of modern and complex software systems. Through its UML profiles, developers can easily extend standard UML notation and adapt it to project-specific needs. Since the transformation engine is based on MDA architecture, design time is reduced as the model process is able to mature to a greater level prior to implementing target-specific detail.
For OpenAmeos, strong community support is already in place. ScopeSET, a leading expert in Ameos technology, has partnered with Aonix in this open source initiative. ScopeSET will provide product support and professional services for Ameos and customer-requested derivatives.
Under the terms of the Ameos open source agreement, a “clean” open source version of Ameos, called OpenAmeos, has been created to ensure that anyone installing a new version of Ameos will be able to use it freely without encumbrances of any other source contributions. This version is freely downloadable at www.openameos.org. In addition, any company or academic institution who wants to distribute OpenAmeos source code is required to also make their changes to the source code freely available to others in order to ensure the continuing open evolution of Ameos.
Executive-level ‘blink’ reporting in functionality of new dashboard
ThoughtWorks’ CruiseControl Enterprise is a major update to CruiseControl continuous integration framework. CruiseControl, widely used in Agile development, accelerates predictable, reliable delivery of software applications. CruiseControl Enterprise includes a major refresh of the user web interface, with added usability for observing current and past builds, and the introduction of an executive-level programme management dashboard offering meaningful ‘blink’ reporting at the highest level.
CruiseControl integrates with over 50 build and configuration management tools and includes plug-ins for email notification, Ant, and various source control tools. CruiseControl is free to use under a BSD-style license.
Real-time Linux enhancements and partnerships
Novell today announced new enhancements to SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time and unveiled new partnerships that expand the ecosystem around Novell's low-latency Linux solution. Built on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise's desktop to datacenter platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time contains the kernel enhancements, packages, tools and utilities that create a robust, high performance, deterministic and low latency operating system. Novell builds SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time in conjunction with Concurrent Computer Corporation. With real-time technology, customers can segment portions of their processors, network bandwidth and other hardware for high-priority mission-critical workloads. This ensures that these workloads are not interrupted by systems calls made by lower-priority workloads or system tasks, delivering predictable performance in time-critical environments.
Novell will ship a maintenance update for SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time in July 2007. This maintenance update delivers new performance enhancements to the real-time operating system. It inherits the improvements and enhancements associated with the recently launched Service Pack 1 for SUSE Linux Enterprise, including new high availability storage and processor support. This update also incorporates support for the latest open source InfiniBand software stack, Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) 1.2, an emerging industry standard for server and storage connectivity.
In support of its real time offerings, Novell also announced today partnerships with key players in the real time arena. These included:
- Concurrent Computer Corporation’s field-proven NightStar advanced analysis and debugging software now supports SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time. Novell is now reselling NightStar tools, offering customers the ability to minimise data latencies, reduce costs and improve efficiency throughout the data centre.
- Novell and Voltaire are delivering a combined solution to increase transaction rates, lower latency and improve CPU utilisation. The combined solution consists of SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time, Voltaire Grid Backbone InfiniBand-based switching solutions, OFED 1.2 InfiniBand software, and additional functionality from Voltaire.
Wind River to Support Freescale Multi-core Platform
Wind River will support for Freescale Semiconductor’s new Multi-core Communications Platform, an innovative multi-core architecture designed to deliver breakthrough efficiencies, performance and scale, while addressing the emerging challenges of multi-core software development.
Wind River will also support forthcoming products based on Freescale’s new multi-core processor roadmap. Multi-core solutions from Freescale and Wind River help remove the complexity associated with developing a software solution on a multi-core silicon system while taking advantage of the performance benefits of multi-core hardware components.
Programming multi-core processors adds a level of complexity that embedded software developers need to manage. This complexity encompasses system design and development. By providing a stable runtime software foundation for communications applications and a complete set of development tool capabilities, Wind River platforms significantly reduce the scope and complexity of the development process.
Mandator signs a framework contract with OMX
The contract covers consultancy services in project management, systems development and testing. The contract will run for 2 years. “The strategic objective of this procurement has been to ensure access to highly skilled IT consultants. In order to achieve this, we have chosen to link up with fewer suppliers, and to set up more long-term ways of working together. We have made an analysis and have reached the conclusion that the companies we have now chosen are the best ones for supporting us in our future developments,” says Åke Södermark, OMX Head of Development.
MontaVista expands in Europe
MontaVista Software continues its expansion of European-based operations, opening new offices and expanding its field operations team. These new executives will be based in Germany, the UK and Finland.
June 2007
IBM to acquire TelelogicIBM has made a cash tender offer for all outstanding shares in Telelogic at a price of 21 Swedish Kronor per share, for an aggregate purchase price of approximately 5.2 billion Swedish Kronor (approximately £372 million). Telelogic’s Board of Directors has recommended that shareholders accept this in the absence of a higher competing offer. Under Swedish regulations IBM must hold 90% of total shares for the takeover to be successful.
Upon acquisition close, Telelogic will become part of the Rational Software division of IBM, reporting to Dr. Danny Sabbah, general manager of IBM Rational Software, who stated, "This acquisition will complement our entire portfolio to help our clients drive efficient and effective software development processes that are vital to product delivery."
Telelogic has been very successful since the telecoms bust of 2001, culminating in 2006 revenues of approximately $208M, including approximately $89M in license revenue and year-on-year growth of 20%. But a drop in after-tax profits shows the market is becoming more competitive and the company may have already passed the peak of its profitability.
Because of the high initial cost of UML systems, modelling has most prominently been used in areas such as telecoms, automotive and military/aerospace where there are high margins available. But the costs have come down recently with companies such as Sparx proving a disruptive force in the marketplace. Indeed Telelogic’s own free tool, Modeler, has reduced the initial cost of entry to that of training and support. Analyst VDC estimated in December that 55% of the market is now using modelling tools that cost less than $1,000 per seat.
The Model Driven Development market is one that is sure to grow in the future with the increasing complexity of software and systems. The main concern for providers is to learn to live with decreasing margins while developing solutions that meet the needs of the marketplace. Another big question for IBM is how they can continue to sell premium tools such as Rhapsody and Software Modeller, while maintaining the income stream necessary to keep shareholders happy.
It is not only modelling that systems like Rhapsody can accomplish, they have been expanded to encompass automatic code generation and, more recently, automatic test generation. These two attributes will grow more and more important in the future when the complexity of systems and software is such that it will be almost impossible to develop code and test it thoroughly using contemporary methods. These and other new features may be the only way that IBM can gain a return on its investment.
May 2007
Adacore joins EclipseAdaCore has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In-Provider.
AdaCore has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In-Provider. This allows AdaCore to participate in the development of the Eclipse ecosystem, and to offer Ada expertise to the Eclipse community as a whole. The company added an Eclipse plug-in to its GNAT Pro Ada tool-suite last year and a recent GNATbench plug-in offers capabilities to support Eclipse 3.2.
New autonomic self-healing tools
Redstone Software’s Eggplant 4.0 has built-in autonomic self-healing image-based testing tools.
Redstone Software’s Eggplant 4.0 has built-in autonomic self-healing image-based testing tools. The new version will include three new features: Productiveti Image Doctor, Productiveti Image Import and Productiveti Image Collections. The new features automatically address changes to the testing interface during script execution, facilitate the rapid development of new test cases and reduce ongoing script maintenance. In addition to reducing the amount of time it takes to develop new scripts, autonomic self-healing of scripts during script execution serves to dramatically simplify ongoing maintenance.
April 2007
Fortify Source Code Analysis Suite 4.5Fortify Software’s Fortify SCA 4.5 includes features that enable development, audit and information security teams to identify and fix security vulnerabilities early and with less effort.
The latest edition of Fortify's software security suite expands on its proven record of identifying and eliminating most security vulnerabilities, and introduces advanced reporting features, enabling intelligent drill-down capabilities, to give security teams precise details regarding coding trends and status. Fortify SCA 4.5 also adds more regulatory compliance reports. Developers and security auditors will also reduce remediation time with a new analysis trace GUI that graphically represents security flaws discovered by the Fortify static analysis engine.
Several out-of-the-box reports will help track progress toward developing secure code, such as reporting on OWASP top-10 issues. Fortify SCA also now supports the creation of customised report with a simple, wizard-based approach. For enterprises concerned with compliance initiatives such as PCI or FISMA, Fortify SCA now comes with pre-built reports to help quickly gauge progress against mandates. Moreover, developers will remediate security issues even faster with Fortify SCA's new graphical interface to visually describe the vulnerabilities uncovered.
Fortify Source Code Analysis Suite is designed to be implemented quickly and efficiently with customer environments, and seamlessly analyses across application architectural tiers, languages (Java, .NET (C#, VB), C/C++, JSP, PL/SQL, Cold Fusion, T-SQL, & XML), platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, Mac OS X) and systems. In addition, it provides customisable reporting and rules capabilities to provide tailored results that meet different groups' needs.
March 2007
AUTOSAR release 2.1Release 2.1 presents the results from the first phase of the standardisation process in the AUTOSAR partnership (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture). This release is available for the partners and members for automotive applications and consolidates the work in the partnership, which has been achieved in approximately three years’ work. These specifications provide the basis for the development of software products that comply with the AUTOSAR partnership’s open standardised software architecture.
These update specifications incorporate practical experience from the internal validation phase. Following the latest additions, the release has now grown to more than 120 documents. Along with additions to the specifications already finalised in the previous release on software architecture components such as basic software and runtime environment, the new release now also includes documents on development methodology and templates.
In addition, the documents on the maintenance and conformance test process have been expanded and the first descriptions for application interfaces, for example for body and interior electronics, have been introduced.
QiValue acquisition
Enea has acquired Swedish QiValue Technologies, a leading provider of Linux solutions. The acquisition will bolster Enea’s Linux expertise, strengthen its software offering, and increase Enea’s ability to offer Embedded Linux solutions. Enea expects the acquisition to contribute SEK 14 million (MUSD 2) of additional revenue as well as a positive margin during 2007.
QiValue, with 13 employees, offers Linux services to equipment makers in the telecom and medical industry and specialises in development of Linux based embedded platforms and Linux training. The consideration amounts to SEK 8 million (MUSD 1.2) with possible additional payments depending on QiValue financial performance until 2009.
DNV establishes new operation to provide IT risk management services
DNV has formed a new operating arm called DNV IT Global Services. The new operation will help large organisations ensure the efficiency and predictability of their IT-dependent processes and software. This will help them to manage risk and maximise business opportunities.
The new operating arm will combine DNV group’s IT risk management knowledge with the expertise of four companies acquired by the group over recent months - CIBIT, Echelon Consulting, Q-Labs and Tireno.
Together they will offer system and software process improvement, IT service management, information management and information security – as well as other centres of excellence, optimising business processes at every stage of the IT lifecycle. Experience spans the finance, telecommunications, government, defence, aerospace and automotive sectors.
While the extensive use of IT-dependent processes has undoubtedly improved organisations’ business efficiency, it has also increased those processes’ overall complexity and potential to be a source of vulnerability within organisations. Nevertheless, IT is a key factor for ensuring efficient business practices, assisting in critical tasks, and increasing people’s ability to analyse and provide relevant data for informed decision-making.
Based in Paris with 300 expert consultants and engineers and training specialists, DNV IT Global Services has identified a €500 million European market opportunity alone within the wider €33 billion European market for IT services.
Hardware-based Trace Tool for Embedded Applications
Texas Instruments partnered with EWA Blackhawk to deliver the XDS560 Trace module, a non-intrusive, hardware-based trace tool offering advanced visibility and capabilities for debugging the specialised problems that arise in high-performance, real-time embedded applications, as well as for fine-tuning code performance and cache optimisation of complex multi-channel applications. Real-time visibility and a high-speed interface provide developers with the information they require to determine where and why complex, intermittent problems occur.
The XDS560 Trace module is comprised of the XDS560 high-speed USB emulator developed by Blackhawk, a division of EWA, and TI’s Trace module design with high-density (HD), 60-pin header connector.
Specialised watchpoints based on hardware-based state machines enable complex, real-time advanced event triggers to start and stop data capture. The Trace module non-intrusively extends full, real-time visibility of registers and counters, requires no special drivers, and is fully supported by TI’s Code Composer Studio IDE.
Advanced Debugging and Profiling Capabilities Real-time bugs are typically extremely complex and difficult to track down. Because they appear intermittently and are extremely sensitive to the overall system context, they can appear almost invisible to developers. Bugs of this nature include race conditions, crashes, scheduling conflicts, runaway code and false interrupts. Typically developers will use a watchpoint to detect that an error has occurred.
However, without a comprehensive execution history, little information is available as to which line of code caused the error or why.
The XDS560 Trace module is well-suited for identifying and resolving these types of bugs, employing a circular buffer to build a complete history of application execution with a completely non-intrusive, real-time data capture. Integrated timestamping, and the ability to correlate data values to the processor’s Program Counter and enables a developer to step backwards through time to reconstruct errors.
One challenge with real-time bugs is that an application can continue running for some time before an error manifests itself, often masking the root cause behind potentially millions of lines of code. Many trace systems can only track tens to thousands of program branches, limiting the usefulness of trace capture. The XDS560 Trace module specifically addresses this issue through the ability to trace back over millions of program branches, guaranteeing that the root cause will be captured within the trace buffer.
The XDS560 Trace module is also capable of profiling an application with a high degree of accuracy. Traditionally, developers wanting to profile code must either use a simulator or intrusively instrument code with breakpoints. Simulators run thousands of times slower than actual applications, limiting their coverage and instrumenting code with breakpoints flushes caches, significantly altering code performance and therefore accuracy.
Universal Embedded System Monitoring Tool
Micrium’s uC/Probe-STD is a universal tool enabling embedded developers to monitor embedded systems in a live environment. Eliminating the need to stop an application in order to get system feedback, uC/Probe saves considerable development time by visually allowing users to see the internals of a running embedded application. As a result, developers can ensure that the system is working properly or immediately identify system instabilities that are visible only when the system is live.
uC/Probe works with compilers, any 8-, 16-, 32- and 64-bit CPUs as well as DSPs and, can be used with any toolchain that can generate a .ELF file, eliminating the need for custom programming or scripting and thus saving additional development time. Data is displayed graphically on a PC running Microsoft Windows, and values can be numeric or shown as gauges, bar graphs, plots, graphs, LEDs, counters, or pie charts. The quality of the visuals is such that uC/Probe could be used to perform system diagnostics or as a final product user interface to allow field technicians to monitor the status of a device remotely.
Saving further development time, uC/Probe does not require users to write code and can operate with or without a real time operating system (RTOS).
The initial release is designed for ARM targets and will use a J-Tag interface for data collection.
Integrated tool suite
IAR Systems’ YellowSuite integrates visualSTATE into the IAR Embedded Workbench IDE, along with the recently introduced IAR PowerPac RTOS and file system, offering a workflow with integration between all the modules, accessed through a familiar IDE.
IAR YellowSuite is a suite that promotes a natural design flow – building in efficiency, code integrity and flexibility from the beginning of a design project. The tools operate on an open systems basis, allowing the user to choose the additional development tools they need, whether from IAR Systems or from other vendors.
At the heart of YellowSuite is IAR Embedded Workbench, the company’s C/C++ compiler, which is available for all popular MCU targets. Integral to IAR Embedded Workbench is the C-SPY debug tool, for testing of code using either a simulator or a hardware debug probe such as IAR J-Link or IAR J-Trace.
WinCE developer package for DaVinci
Abacus Embedded’s DaVinci-CE developers package ships with an exclusive MPC DaVinci WinCE board support package. It also includes four hours consultancy from MPC Data, a Microsoft Embedded Gold Partner, and a TI DaVinci Authorised Software Provider.
Features of the Abacus DaVinci-CE Developers Kit include a 120-day evaluation version of WinCE platform builder and a discount voucher for training workshops. The kit ships with all of the Texas Instruments hardware of the standard DaVinci EVM, including a DM6446 device, a 40Gb HDD, a PAL camera, an LCD screen, speakers, microphone and IR remote. Evaluation codec’s available include H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AAC+ and G7.11.
Key verification technologies for SystemC
JEDA Technologies’ NSCv adds functional data coverage, dynamic threading, and a new memory management system to SystemC. NSCv’s functional data coverage provides engineers with the ability to collect and analyse user-specified metrics to gain better insight of their models and testbenches. For the architect, this capability provides insight about the internals of the model and points out functional weaknesses that cannot be covered with C++ code coverage tools.
Arm builds Graphics Stack
ARM‘s two new Mali GPUs deliver 3D graphics for next-generation mobile games on smartphones and other high-end portable devices. With a small footprint, the ARM Mali processors bring 3D graphics capabilities to low-cost feature phones. Both graphics processors feature a rendering architecture that scales from small displays up to HDTV resolution, while minimising memory bandwidth and conserving battery life.