• Delivers substantial productivity benefits
• Re-uses MATLAB/Simulink test cases for the automatic test of functional applications and introduces requirements traceability

Brest, France – 12th March 2010. Geensoft, the specialist independent provider of software design tools and associated professional services for embedded systems development, has launched the AUTOSAR Re-targeting Tool (ART) module for AUTOSAR Builder, its award-winning tool suite for the development of AUTOSAR-compliant automotive embedded systems.

The new ART module delivers substantial productivity benefits through the automatic generation of AUTOSAR-compliant C code that is ready to be embedded on target ECUs, from both new and legacy MATLAB/Simulink models using RTW. The launch of the new ART module further strengths AUTOSAR Builder’s position as the market-leading tool suite for the development of AUTOSAR applications.

The ART methodology is a two-fold process – import and generate. The importation process directly integrates MATLAB/Simulink models into AUTOSAR Builder enabling mapping between systems/sub-systems and SW-C/runnables. Once the mapping between the top level ARElements, which describe the AUTOSAR application, and MATLAB/Simulink elements is complete, the new ART module automatically generates the SW-C templates and re-targeted AUTOSAR C code ready to be embedded on target ECUs.

In conjunction with AUTOSAR Builder’s companion ASIM simulation module, which provides a validation and verification solution for AUTOSAR systems, the new ART module can be used to provide a guarantee of the correctness of the AUTOSAR architecture coming from MATLAB/Simulink, through a VFB simulation of the entire architecture. The simulation can re-use existing MATLAB/Simulink test cases imported into the ART project workspace to automatically test the functional application mapped to the AUTOSAR architecture.

The ART module is further augmented and strengthened by the new AUTOSAR Builder Tagger (AB Tagger) which brings the power of Geensoft’s market-leading Reqtify requirements engineering tool suite to the AUTOSAR environment. The AB Tagger adds requirements information to AUTOSAR XML descriptions to provide requirements traceability from any ARElement to C code and ease traceability from the input specification to the output implementation.

In addition to providing AUTOSAR re-targeting for MATLAB/Simulink models, Geensoft is also progressing plans to support other model-based tools used for high-level automotive embedded systems design specification, including dSPACE’s TargetLink and ETAS’ ASCET.

About Geensoft

Geensoft delivers industry-proven, best-in-class embedded systems development tools and professional services that help engineering teams in the aerospace, automotive, defence, energy, industrial automation, medical and transportation industries to more efficiently manage their engineering processes as well as design, verify and validate their model-based embedded systems applications. Privately owned with 60+ employees and headquartered in France, Geensoft has sales offices in Europe and Japan supported by a network of distributors and value-added integrators worldwide. Geensoft’s products include the award-winning Reqtify, ControlBuild and AUTOSAR Builder as well as RT-Builder tool suites. Reqtify provides automated management of embedded systems and software requirements capture, traceability and impact analysis throughout the entire development lifecycle. AUTOSAR Builder enables ARTOP-based design, development, verification and validation of AUTOSAR-compliant automotive electronic systems. ControlBuild is a front-to-back environment for the design, development, validation, deployment and maintenance of control and automation systems and applications. RT-Builder facilitates the modelling, simulation and validation of distributed real-time architectures for multi-processor and multi-bus systems.

10^th March, 2010, Northwich, Cheshire – Kane Computing are pleased to announce that Impulse Accelerated Technologies recently launched a new FPGA hardware library supporting C-language math.h functions.

Unlike math.h functions that run “native” in embedded processors, the Impulse library is implemented directly in FPGA hardware, and supports refactoring into multiple, pipelined parallel processes. When used in this way, the math.h functions operate 2 – 10X faster than on embedded processors. And because they are callable from Impulse C, they are more accessible to software developers and others less familiar with FPGA hardware, saving weeks of HDL hand coding and iteration time.

The new math.h library adds more scientific, algorithmic and engineering functions to the existing Impulse C floating point support. The library provides access to single- and double-precision functions such as sin, cosine, log, tan, exp, pow, sqrt, etc.  Library components are provided with standard C-language function prototypes, allowing them to be easily invoked, using the same function calling methods C programmers are familiar with. These C-callable functions represent optimized math elements that are instantiated, through the use of synthesis and place-and-route tools, in the target FPGA. The Impulse C math.h Library is royalty free. 

“Running floating point functions directly in hardware helps accelerate the performance of embedded applications”, said Michael Kreeger of Kreeger Research. “By providing common math.h functions, Impulse increases the accessibility of Xilinx Virtex and Spartan devices to the wider software audience.”

Impulse C enables software developers to create modules for field programmable gate arrays. These modules may use FPGA hardware, FPGA coprocessors, or the resources of entire FPGA based co-processing development boards. The Impulse tool suite creates the necessary hardware interconnections from the developer’s ANSI C code, and preserves the full ANSI compatibility of the code. Within the Impulse tools, software developers are able to refactor C code for massive parallelizing to exploit the available FPGA resources. Impulse products work with GCC/GDB or Visual Studio™ and produces acceleration of 10X to 300X. Development times are typically halved and iteration time reduced by 80%.

“The Impulse user group has grown past 1,400. About 1/3 appear to be software developers exploring hardware acceleration” commented Brian Durwood, co-founder of Impulse. He elaborated, “For them, automating floating point library acceleration lowers a hurdle for software-to-hardware compilation. Accordingly we are seeing research labs at universities creating reconfigurable computer arrays that challenge the old line supercomputers, in a fraction of the footprint and which reach a wider user group.”

About Impulse

Impulse Accelerated Technologies (www.ImpulseC.com) provides C-to-FPGA tools, training and custom hardware/software solutions for automotive, defense, industrial and financial customers worldwide. Impulse tools are used for vision systems, face and object recognition; video feed analysis for national security and automotive applications. Impulse customers develop FPGA-based products as well as targeting ASIC deployments.  Impulse products are in use at over half of automotive suppliers and eight of the world’s top ten defense contractors.

About Kane Computing

KCL (www.kanecomputing.co.uk) has been providing Image Processing, DSP and high performance computing products for use in industry, education and research since 1987 and is a Texas Instruments Third Party Partner specialising in consultancy and advice on TI development tools/platforms and image processing applications. KCL have extensive knowledge and experience of providing video compression solutions for many industries particularly for digital video security and high quality broadcast applications. KCL has a policy of continual improvement and operates its business in accordance with the requirements of ISO9001:2008.