San Jose, CA. 31 March 2014—LDRA, the leader in standards compliance, automated software verification, source code analysis and test tools, announced its ability to provide cost-effective verification of multicore systems to safety-critical standards. With industry’s continued emphasis on reducing size, weight, and power (SWaP), safety-critical systems manufacturers continue to look for ways to achieve full verification and even certification of multicore systems in a cost-effective manner. LDRA’s ability to instrument and capture analysis and test data from such systems breaks through the verification barrier, promising system developers the resources and technology they need to achieve rigorous certification.
LDRA Breaks Through Verification Barrier for Multicore Environments
The need for greater processing power with reduced power consumption is driving the developers of safety-critical applications toward multicore systems. Verification of such systems for rigorous safety-critical certifications such as DO-178C poses specific challenges. When multiple processes run on different cores, collecting structural coverage data and creating and executing tests efficiently can be hampered by concurrency, reliability, and robustness roadblocks.
LDRA confronts such challenges on multiple levels:
1) With highly optimised instrumentation and analysis, LDRA aggregates the coverage data across the various processors in the multicore system without the typical overhead of mutexes. This approach avoids the deadlocks caused by other verification tools and technologies.
2) LDRA integration with RTOS and compiler vendors such as Wind River and Green Hills Software is comprehensive, enabling execution of all capabilities across the set of cores.
3) LDRA’s dramatically reduced and optimised instrumentation and data collection eases memory and performance overhead.
“Capturing the data from these complex architectures which run multiple applications concurrently represents a significant breakthrough in verification of multicore systems,” confirmed Ian Hennell, Operations Director of LDRA. “Thanks to our 40-plus years of experience in helping customers achieve certification and standards compliance, we have fine-tuned the integration of the LDRA tool suite with the platforms and tool chains in these safety-critical domains. And, we have developed technology that is so optimised that high-performance systems continue to behave as intended, enabling us to capture accurate data for system analysis.”
LDRA Leadership Strong in Multicore Platform Environments
LDRA provides rich, industry-proven integrations with today’s leading safety-critical RTOS vendors. In the avionics sector, LDRA offers full support for the integrated modular avionics technology offered by both Wind River ARINC 653 and Green Hills Integrity-178C. LDRA support includes advanced I/O, project file and IDE integrations, integrations with compiler tool chains and simulators across a wide range of silicon, and integrations with virtualised environments.
The LDRA tool suite works seamlessly within the various tool chains, enabling development teams to bring together the development, execution, and verification infrastructure. LDRA’s capabilities for coding-standard compliance, structural coverage, data and control coupling, and low-level testing can be introduced into the verification workflow as needed on the host, simulator, or actual target hardware. Such comprehensive capabilities dramatically improve workflow and development transparency, and ultimately ensure quality of the delivered multicore application.
Hennell added, “As multicore solutions proliferate, development organisations must have cost-effective, assured methods for verifying these systems. LDRA’s experience and tools help solve these challenges through simplification, automated methodology, and rich technologies. LDRA will continue to alleviate this complexity and leverage integrations to make the engineers’ lives easier and the cost of certifying multicore projects manageable.”
About LDRA
For more than forty years, LDRA has developed and driven the market for software that automates code analysis and software testing for safety-, mission-, security-, and business-critical markets. Working with clients to achieve early error identification and full compliance with industry standards, LDRA traces requirements through static and dynamic analysis to unit testing and verification for a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. Boasting a worldwide presence, LDRA is headquartered in the United Kingdom with subsidiaries in the United States and India coupled with an extensive distributor network. For more information on the LDRA tool suite, please visit www.ldra.com.
