LabVIEW, SCADE Suite

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

News Release from: Esterel Technologies S.A.
26/02/2008

Esterel Technologies 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.