The MathWorks Creates New Industry Design Standards
8 March 2000
The MathWorks Creates New Industry Design Standards in Collaboration With Leading Auto Makers
NATICK, Mass.--March 7, 2000---- Automotive Advisory Board Meets at General Motors in June 2000 --
The MathWorks, Inc. today announced that its fourth MathWorks Automotive Advisory Board (MAAB) summit with its leading automotive customers will be held in June 2000. A team of four top auto manufacturers - DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Toyota Motor Corporation - and their key suppliers will join The MathWorks product development team to provide ideas for enhancements to MathWorks software design tools. Collaboration among the engineering groups of automotive industry leaders is unusual in this competitive arena. However, automotive leaders have found their joint efforts yield powerful results.
A key topic for the June meeting will be developing innovations in the calibration process using MathWorks products. In addition, the board will discuss the industry's requirements for automatic generation of production-quality embedded code from models built with the MathWorks Simulink(R) and Stateflow(R) tools for model-based development of embedded control systems.
MAAB was formed in 1998 at the request of leading automotive manufacturers that use MathWorks tools to develop, simulate, and deploy real-time embedded control systems. These software tools enable automotive engineers and designers to develop algorithms, model and simulate systems for rapid prototyping, generate embedded code, and calibrate and test systems in one integrated environment. Specifically, MAAB advises The MathWorks about functionality that allows manufacturers and suppliers to thoroughly simulate subsystems during early design stages, reducing the cost of in-vehicle testing and minimizing costly redesign late in the development process.
"MATLAB(R), Simulink, Stateflow, and Real-Time Workshop(R) are gaining strength as the de facto industry standards for automotive control system design. The MathWorks is dedicated to ensuring that our automotive customers are deriving the maximum benefit of our solutions - higher quality products, lower design costs, faster time to market, and ultimately, better engineered cars," said Andy Grace, Director of Development at The MathWorks. "Our automotive customers recognize the fundamental role The MathWorks plays in their industry and are taking full advantage of MAAB as a forum to express their common needs."
Since the inception of MAAB, the auto manufacturers have hosted the summit meetings at their sites. DaimlerChrysler hosted the first MAAB meeting in Germany in 1998. In 1999, Toyota and Ford invited MAAB to Japan and Detroit, respectively.
Based on the success of the first two MAAB meetings, The MathWorks and the automotive manufacturers welcomed leading automotive suppliers, including Continental Teves, Delphi Automotive Systems, DENSO Corporation, Motorola Semiconductor Products, Siemens Automotive, and Visteon Automotive Systems, to the third MAAB summit in September 1999. At the meeting, the board described its vision for using the MathWorks development environment as a common interface for the exchange of requirements and models across organizations throughout the design chain. As a result, suppliers are adopting MathWorks modeling, simulation, and code generation tools to provide executable specifications and testing frameworks that ensure their finished sub-components and subsystems work as intended by the auto makers. Also, both manufacturers and suppliers are altering their design processes to take advantage of the tools' capabilities.
In the past five years, The MathWorks family of software design tools has experienced tremendous growth in the automotive industry. The number of Real-Time Workshop and Stateflow seats has tripled in the automotive supplier community in the last two years, while seats for all of the products have continued to increase steadily in the manufacturer community. As a result, tens of thousands of automotive engineers around the world use MathWorks products for research, design, simulation, implementation, and test.
About The MathWorks, Inc.
Established in 1984, The MathWorks, Inc., based in Natick, Mass., provides the leading software computing environment and solutions for engineers, scientists, and technical professionals. The MathWorks is dedicated to offering tools for numeric computation, visualization, and simulation to a variety of disciplines at institutions and industries. Among them are the world's automotive, aerospace, environmental, telecommunications, computer peripherals, medical, financial, and educational organizations.
The MathWorks pioneered MATLAB, a high-level language for technical computation that has largely supplanted FORTRAN. Building on that, The MathWorks developed Simulink and other powerful software tools for model-based design, which are changing the way engineers develop real-time and embedded systems. Today more than 500,000 users around the globe rely on The MathWorks products for innovative solutions and tremendous gains in flexibility and productivity. Information about The MathWorks, Inc. and its products can be found at www.mathworks.com.