TNI-Valiosys Introduces Sildex to Improve Quality of Real-Time System Specification
PARIS--March 4, 2002--TNI-Valiosys, a French provider of system-design solutions for real-time applications, today announces a major release of Sildex, the company's flagship system design tool targeted at aerospace, automotive and telecommunications real-time applications.
Sildex has recently been selected by Airbus to perform architectural design of the real-time SW embedded in the new A380 aircraft, including critical flight-control systems. "Sildex fully supports Airbus integrated modular avionic library components. The tool's simulation and formal proof capabilities are crucial in helping to validate critical system properties and in developing system test scenarios that can be reused later during the integration phase. Sildex is a very important addition to the suite of TNI-Valiosys' design tools already deployed by Airbus." commented Pierre Dissaux, TNI-Valiosys Aerospace & Defence Marketing Director.
"The high complexity found in today's real-time systems, involving numerous and intricate interactions between control and data-processing functions, renders necessary the use of formal techniques to ensure that the system has been correctly specified," said Giang Nguyen, TNI-Valiosys Vice President of Marketing. "Using Sildex, system designers can either graphically capture both control and data elements, or import Simulink models, perform simulation and formal property checking, and automatically generate fixed-point production-quality C code, creating in the process executable specs and early and evolving prototypes of their real-time systems." she added.
- Applications
TNI-Valiosys Sildex spectrum of application covers control systems, embedded software, real-time systems, signal processing, and safety-critical software whose failure could have serious consequences. These applications are commonly found in the aerospace, defence, automotive, energy and telecommunications industries.
Sildex has been successfully deployed by a number of industrial customers, including Airbus (A380 embedded SW design), Snecma Motors (formal spec, validation and code generation of electronic turbojet regulation system), France's Electrical and Gas Utilities (rapid prototyping of electrical substation control functions), PSA, STMicroelectronics and Nortel.
- Advantages
In all these areas, TNI-Valiosys Sildex contributes to streamlining the development processes, eliminating translation costs, from specification to implementation to test. Using a graphical front-end, system designers can capture complex interactions between control and data functions, optionally taking into account SW multi-tasking via an RTOS. An RTOS library is available which contains components dedicated to modelling concurrent systems, such as pre-emptive actions, shared resources, event routing and filtering, FIFO buffer, etc. Sildex also supports StateFlow and Simulink inputs.
Next, using an integrated simulator, designers can visually follow the evolution of the system model's state machines and data flows. Alternatively, the property checker can be invoked to formally verify system properties. Sildex either guarantees 100% correctness or if this is not the case, will provide a test sequence leading to the cause of the problem behaviour. Combining both validation techniques, designers can detect specification errors and ambiguities early in the design process, critical or safety aspects can be formally validated, and test scenarios obtained during the validation phase can be reused for integration testing.
Once validation has been completed, Sildex can automatically generate highly optimised fixed-point C code. Automatic documentation generation and requirements traceability are equally available to provide full-cycle development support.
Real-time systems generally consist of both control and data-processing functions. Yet available commercial tools only let designers deal with one or the other. TNI-Valiosys Sildex is unique in allowing both multi-format (Simulink, StateFlow, C, Signal, Sildex graphical libraries, etc.) control and data elements to be specified and validated in a single environment. In addition, while most commercially available proof engines are based on BDD, a technique well-known for the state-space explosion problem, Sildex is based on TNI-Valiosys' propriety formal technology, which can handle much larger designs. And finally, for most control applications, the fixed-point C code generated by Sildex is of high enough quality to be directly embedded in the target HW. "Currently, HW implementation paths are not yet available. However, we'll soon be implementing SystemC support as a way for Sildex to front-end System-on-Chip (SOC) or Platform-Based Design solutions." commented Giang Nguyen.
- Training
Sildex comes with a full range of consultancy, training and support services.
- HW OS Support
Sildex currently supports Windows NT and Sun/Solaris platforms.
- About TNI-Valiosys
TNI-Valiosys provides a comprehensive set of software and hardware system design solutions to enable designers of real-time applications in aerospace, automotive, semi-conductor, telecommunications and industrial automation to build better system-level models and implementations of their electronic products in less time.
The result of recent mergers between three French high-tech companies - Valiosys, formal verification specialist; Arexsys, system-level modelling expert; and TNI, supplier of SW design tools for real-time embedded systems - TNI-Valiosys is financed by venture capital.
TNI-Valiosys employs 80 people at its headquarters and R&D facilities in France and has a network of direct sales in Europe and local representatives in North America and Taiwan. www.tni-valiosys.com