Esterel Technologies has announced the availability of Esterel SCADE® 6.1, further bolstering its position in model-based development for critical embedded applications. SCADE 6.1 includes significant productivity enhancements to model-based design entry, new verification technologies, and expanded tool-chain integration and interoperability. Enhancements have been made to both SCADE Suite™ and SCADE Display™, members of the Esterel Technologies SCADE family of products.
Eric Bantegnie, president and CEO of Esterel Technologies, said: “This release is in direct response to our customers’ requests for more flexible design entry, improved visibility into run-time performance, and the ability to share designs more efficiently. SCADE 6.1 is another major milestone in advancing our leadership position providing model-based solutions for critical embedded software developers.”
Model-based development has improved developer productivity by more than 30% for developers of safety, mission and life-critical systems and software applications as compared with traditional manual methods. Furthermore model-based design, when combined with formal verification and certified code generation, ensures the quality of deployed applications under standards such as DO-178B, EN 50128, and IEC 61508.
SCADE Suite 6.1 builds on the success of formal model-based design and certified code generation by providing formal decision diagram entry, enhanced SCADE model differencing and merging and fine-grained model-based configuration management. With these enhancements, SCADE Suite developers now can quickly describe, through graphical entry, core decision logic in the application. From a collaboration perspective, developers now have the ability to easily compare and contrast design changes at the graphical level and manage those configurations at a user-defined granularity. This flexibility and graphical approach increases developer productivity and facilitates developer collaboration and design sharing.
From the verification perspective, SCADE 6.1 also introduces a number of significant improvements by expanding the methods of verification and ultimately shortening the time-to-verification of the deployed application. SCADE Suite 6.1 now provides SCADE Suite LabVIEW™ Gateway, enabling software-in-the-loop simulation and rapid prototyping, complete with automatic targeting of LabVIEW hardware and integration with real sensors and actuators.
In addition SCADE 6.1 launches new verification technology in SCADE Suite Timing Verifier™ and SCADE Suite Stack Verifier™ powered by ABSINT GmBH’s aiT and StackAnalyzer products. These products provide unprecedented visibility into the run-time performance of the system, reporting worst-case execution time (WCET) and stack usage of each design element at the model level. To round out the verification process, SCADE 6.1 now comes with certification kits for EN 50128 and IEC 61508, in addition to the previously available DO-178B Certification Kit.
SCADE 6.1 has also expanded its tool-chain integration capability with a new Java™-based application programming interface for Eclipse™, packaged as an Eclipse plug-in.
Embedded graphics display application developers will benefit from major enhancements in the SCADE Display 6.1 release. Leading these enhancements is a new VAPS® 6.x Importer, capable of moving large legacy VAPS designs into the advanced SCADE Display development environment. In addition, SCADE Display 6.1 introduces new font management and transparency (alpha-blending) capabilities, further enhancing design entry and the quality of the deployed embedded graphics display applications. SCADE Display 6.1, with its advanced graphics library OGLX™ (OpenGL Extension for SCADE Display) and intrinsic layered architecture, supports the development of both 2D/3D applications.
With the release of SCADE 6.1, SCADE Suite and SCADE Display are now tightly integrated, providing a unique co-editing, co-simulation, and integrated production code generation environment for developers of embedded control application and embedded graphics display applications, respectively. This integration dramatically improves the productivity of developers working in each of these environments.