dSPACE Announces Collaboration With Motorola

    SAN FRANCISCO--April 10, 2001--Motorola, Inc., a leading supplier of semiconductors to the automotive industry, and dSPACE, a leading producer of prototyping and hardware-in-the-loop engineering development tools, today announced an agreement for mutual product development and support.
    Motorola and dSPACE plan to develop tools to help boost efficiency and cut the time necessary for developing and testing software for electronic control units (ECUs). The two firms plan to jointly develop target optimization modules, which will be used for Motorola's automotive processors, HC12 and MPC555. The processors will be integrated with dSPACE's production-quality code generator -- TargetLink.
    The agreement was announced at the Embedded Systems Conference West 2001, April 10-12, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. Attendance is expected to exceed 16,000 for the three-day conference.
    Motorola plans to collaborate with dSPACE on early specifications of advanced processors and their instruction set simulators, before the first engineering samples of new processor architectures are available. In exchange, dSPACE will implement evaluation board support and target optimization modules in the dSPACE TargetLink tool. The simultaneous development of processors and corresponding code generators anticipates production-quality code generation from TargetLink to be available at almost the same time new processors enter the market.
    "It is impressive how the TargetLink optimization module harnesses the potential performance of our microprocessors -- both the PowerPC(TM) family and the HC12 family," states Salim Momin, Motorola's Virtual Garage manager. "As processors become increasingly sophisticated, their complexity increases. TargetLink will help software developers in the embedded industry meet the challenges of that complexity, while also helping them benefit from the advances in technology. This is yet another example of how Motorola collaborates to offer the industry's richest portfolio of embedded solutions technologies, software, tools, services and knowledge."
    Using a code generator such as TargetLink guarantees that all potential optimizations are used consistently -- a guarantee not possible with handwritten code. As an additional benefit, TargetLink generates target-specific code for a compiler/processor combination by using compiler-specific language extensions, inline assembly and specific code that directly accesses the processor architecture. This creates more efficient code, especially in comparison to generic ANSI C code.
    "Automatic code generation for embedded systems is a strong, viable alternative to handwritten code only if it meets hard, real-time requirements while sparing processor resources. This can only be achieved by target-aware code generators like TargetLink that are specifically written for a given processor/compiler combination," says Thomas Thomsen, TargetLink product manager at dSPACE.
    "With this agreement, Motorola and dSPACE have bridged a gap between engineering and consulting by supplying powerful microcontrollers and using intelligent, third-party development tools," Thomsen notes.