In 2003, the Danish office was closed and all operations moved to the Phoenix location.
Origins
The origins of DDC International A/S lay in Dansk Datamatik Center, a Danish software research and development organization that was formed in 1979 to demonstrate the value of using modern techniques, especially those involving formal methods, in software design and development. Among its several projects was the creation of a compiler system for the programming language Ada. Ada was a difficult language to implement and early compiler projects for it often proved disappointments.[1] But the DDC compiler design was sound and it first passed the United States Department of Defense-sponsored Ada Compiler Validation Capability (ACVC) standardized suite of language and runtime tests on a VAX/VMS system in September 1984.[2] As such, it was the first European Ada compiler to meet this standard.[3][4]
Success of the Ada project led to a separate company being formed in 1985, called DDC International A/S, with the purpose of commercializing the Ada compiler system product.[5] Like its originator, it was based in Lyngby, Denmark. Ole N. Oest was named the managing director of DDC International.[6] In 1986, DDC-I, Inc. was founded as the American subsidiary company.[7] Located in Phoenix, Arizona, it focused on sales, customer support, and engineering consulting activities in the United States.[8]
Ada compiler
DDC International A/S was housed in a converted textile mill in Lyngby, Denmark, here seen in 1990.
DDC-I established a business in selling the Ada compiler system product, named DACS, directly to firms, both as software to develop projects in Ada with, and as source code to computer makers and others, who would rehost or retarget it to other processors and operating systems.[9][10]
The first business sold both native compilers and cross compilers, with the latter more common since Ada was primarily used in the embedded systems realm. One of the first cross compilers that DDC-I developed was from VAX/VMS to the Intel 8086 and Intel 80286; the effort was already underway by early 1985.[9] It began as a joint venture with the Italian defense electronics company Selenia that would target both their MARA-860 and MARA-286 multi-microprocessor computers, based on the 8086 and 80286 architectures, and generic embedded and OS-hosting 8086 and 80286 systems.[11] This work was the start of what would become the largest-selling product line for the firm. DDC-I developed a reputation for quality Ada cross compilers and runtime systems for Intel 80x86 processors.[8]
Several Ada compiler developers at DDC International in Lyngby in 1990.
Later developers were often less well versed in formal methods and did not use them in their work on the compiler.[14] This was even more so in the case of companies retargeting the compiler, many of which were unfamiliar with the Ada language.[15][16]
DDC-I was in the same market as several other Ada compiler firms, including Alsys, TeleSoft, Verdix, Tartan Laboratories, and TLD Systems.[4] (DDC-I would go on to stay in business longer than any of these others.[14]) As with other Ada compiler vendors, much of the time of DDC-I engineers was spent in conforming to the large, difficult ACVC tests.[17][18]
Starting in 1988 and continuing for several years, DDC-I consultants collaborated with Honeywell Air Transport Systems to retarget and optimize the DDC-I Ada compiler to the AMD 29050 processor.[19][20] This DDC-I-based cross compiler system was used to develop the primary flight software for the Boeing 777 airliner.[8][20] This software, named the Airplane Information Management System, would become arguably the best-known of any Ada-in-use project, civilian or military.[21] Some 550 developers at Honeywell worked on the flight system and it was publicized as a major Ada success story.[20]
DDC-I's development office in New York was on the 31st floor of this building.
In October 1991, it was announced that DDC-I had acquired the Ada and JOVIAL language embedded systems business of InterACT, which had become a venture of Advanced Computer Techniques.[22] This wholly owned New York-based entity was briefly named DDC-Inter[22] before being subsumed into DDC-I proper. This brought Ada cross compilers for the MIL-STD-1750A and MIPS R3000 processors, and JOVIAL language cross compilers for the MIL-STD-1750A and Zilog Z8002 into the product line. The MIPS product was one which DDC-I emphasised, with engineering efforts that included automatic recognition of certain tasking optimizations,[23] and work in the U.S. Air Force-sponsored Common Ada Runtime System (CARTS) project towards providing standard interfaces into Ada runtime environments.[24][25]
At the end of 1993, the New York office was closed, and its work transferred to the Phoenix office.
The DDC International office in Lyngby showed Danish design elements, here seen in 1992.
In the early 1990s, DDC-I worked on redesigning the compiler system for the wide-ranging Ada 95 revision of the language standard. They used a new object-based programming design and still adhered to a formal methods approach as well, using VDM-SL.[28] The work was done under sponsorship of the European Community-based Open Microprocessor Initiative's Global Language and Uniform Environment -project (OMI/GLUE), where DDC-I's role was to create a compiler targeting the Architecture Neutral Distribution Format (ANDF) intermediate form, with the intention of bringing Ada 95 to more platforms quickly.[28][29] As part of this work, DDC-I collaborated with the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency in expanding some of ANDF's abilities to express semantics of Ada and the fast-growing programming language C++.[30] Work in Ada-specific areas, such as bounds-checking elimination, was done to get optimal run-time performance.[31]
The Ada software environment was originally thought to be a promising market.[32] But the Ada compiler business proved to be a difficult one to be in.[33] During this time, 1987–97, a U.S. government mandate for Ada use was in effect, albeit with some waivers granted.[34] Many of the advantages of the language for general-purpose programming were not seen as such by the general software engineering community or by educators.[35] The sales situation was challenging, with periodic small layoffs. Despite consolidation among other Ada tool providers, DDC-I remained an independent company.[36]
In any case, DDC-I was an enthusiastic advocate of the Ada language, for use in the company[37] and externally. A paper one of its engineers published in 1993 assessed Ada 95's object-oriented features favorably to those of C++ and attracted some attention.[38]
A view of palm trees from the DDC-I office in Phoenix, 1993.
At the same time, the firm attempted to expand and augment its product line. The RAISE toolset was available, as was Cedar, a design tool for real-time systems. Also offered was Beologic, a tool to develop and run state/event parts of applications, that had been licensed from Bang & Olufsen and integrated with the Ada compiler system.[39] The biggest effort was in the direction of C++. DDC-I began offering 1st Object Exec, a C++-based real-time operating system intended for direct, object-level support of embedded applications.[40] Despite considerable efforts during 1993–94, 1st Object Exec failed to gain traction in the marketplace.
The one area where Ada did gain a solid foothold was in real-time, high-reliability, high-integrity, safety-critical applications such as aerospace.[41][34][42] Based on its experience with Honeywell and other customers, DDC-I acquired expertise in the mapping of Ada language and runtime features to the requirements of safety-critical certifications, in particular those for the DO-178B (Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification) standard, and provided tools for that process.[43] Such applications continued even after the Ada mandate was dropped in 1997.[34] For instance, in 1997 the firm was awarded a joint contract with Sikorsky Aircraft and Boeing Defense & Space Group's Helicopters Division to develop software to be used in the Boeing/Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche.[44]
In March 1998, DDC-I acquired from Texas Instruments the development and sales and marketing rights to the Tartan Ada compilers for the Intel i960, Motorola 680x0, and MIL-STD-1750A targets.[45]
Support for mixed language development was added in 2000 with the addition of the programming language C as part of DDC-I's mixed-language integrated development environment for SCORE (for Safety-Critical, Object-oriented, Real-time Embedded).[46] Leveraging the ANDF format, the DWARF standardized debugging format, and the OMI protocol for communicating with target board debug monitors, SCORE was able to provide a common building and debugging environment for real-time application developers.[46] Support for Embedded C++ was added to SCORE in 2003, by which time it could integrate with a variety of target board scenarios on Intel x86 and Power PC processors.[47] The C and Embedded C++ compilers for ANDF came from a licensing arrangement for the TenDRA Compiler (later DDC-I became the maintainer of those compilers). Subsequently, Ada 95 support for the older 1750A and TMS320C4x processors was added to SCORE.[48]
U.S. headquarters and real-time operating systems
By April 2003 the industry move away from Ada and the declining position of the aircraft industry had taken its toll and DDC-I suffered significant financial losses. DDC-I decided to close its Denmark office in Lyngby and move all operations to Phoenix.[49]
In September 2005, the company named Bob Morris, formerly of LynuxWorks, as its president and chief executive officer.[50] Oest became Chief Technology Officer.[51] In April 2006, DDC-I moved to new offices in northern Phoenix, stating that it was expanding and that it expected revenue to grow 40–50 percent over the previous year.[52]
Since 2006, the company has been contributing to the Java Expert Group for Safety Critical Java.[53] This work, which uses the Real-time specification for Java as a base and then specifies language and library subsets and coding rules for use to provide sufficient determinism, is seen by the firm's representatives as making Java possibly equal or superior to either Ada or C++ as a language for safety-critical applications.[54] The company has viewed the safety-critical Java profile as one that can help the defense industry deal with the issue of aging software and hardware applications.[55] By 2008, DDC-I was referring to Ada as a legacy language and offering semi-automated tools and professional services to help customers migrate to newer solutions.[51]
In November 2008, the company entered the embedded real-time operating system (RTOS) market with two products, Deos and HeartOS.[56][57][58] Both were based on underlying software technology originated at Honeywell International and already deployed on many commercial and military aircraft.[56] As part of the action, DDC-I hired some of the key Honeywell engineering staff who had designed Deos.[56] Other firms in the same RTOS market segment as DDC-I include LynuxWorks, Wind River Systems, SYSGO, and Express Logic.[59]
Following its entry into the RTOS market segment in 2008, products and services associated with the Deos RTOS quickly became the core business focus and primary area of R&D investment for DDC-I. Major additions to the Deos product line and the year of introduction include: 2011 - ARINC 653 interface support, 2014 - expansion of support for ARM Cortex-A based processors in addition to the existing support for x86 and PowerPC processors, 2015 - addition of support for the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Safety Base Operating System Segment (OSS) profile, 2017 - multicore processor support via its SafeMC Technology, 2019 - received FACE Conformance Certificate for OSS Safety Base profile to FACE Technical Standard, Edition 3.0, 2021 - first RTOS to receive a FACE Conformance Certificate for OSS Safety Base and Extended profiles to FACE Technical Standard, Edition 3.1, 2023 - completion of second multicore DO-178C Design Assurance Level A (DAL A) verification on multiple ARM and PowerPC processors.
Products
Deos is a time and space partitioned real-time operating system (RTOS) that was first certified to DO-178B DAL A in 1998. Deos contains several patented architectural features including enhancements for processor utilization, binary software reuse and safe scheduling for multi-core processors. Deos users have the ability to add on optional ARINC 653 personality modules designed to fit different application needs. Deos supports the processors ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86, and is supported by popular SSL/TLS libraries such as wolfSSL.[60][61] It was listed as one of the Hot 100 Electronic Products of 2009 by EDN magazine.[62]
HeartOS is a POSIX-based hard real-time operating system, designed for small to medium embedded applications including safety-critical types. It supports ARM, PowerPC, x86[63] and other 16-bit and 32-bit processors. It is configurable without the POSIX interface layer for memory-constrained systems.
SCORE is a mixed-language set of integrated tools for safety-critical, object-oriented, real-time embedded software applications, supporting Ada, C, and Embedded C++ applications for a variety of embedded architectures.[65]
Legacy Ada 83 and JOVIAL compiler system products also continue to be supported.[66]
Bibliography
Bjørner, Dines; Gram, Christian; Oest, Ole N.; Rystrøm, Leif (2011). "Dansk Datamatik Center". In Impagliazzo, John; Lundin, Per; Wangler, Benkt (eds.). History of Nordic Computing 3: IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Springer. pp.350–359. A slightly expanded version of this chapter is available online at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221271386_Dansk_Datamatik_Center. A further expanded version is part of Bjørner's online memoir at http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~dibj/trivia/node5.html. A slides presentation by Gram based on the paper is available online as Why Dansk Datamatik Center?
Bjørner, Dines; Havelund, Klaus. "40 Years of Formal Methods: Some Obstacles and Some Possibilities?". FM 2014: Formal Methods: 19th International Symposium, Singapore, May 12–16, 2014. Proceedings. Springer. pp.42–61.
Clemmensen, Geert B. (January 1986). "Retargeting and rehosting the DDC Ada compiler system: A case study – the Honeywell DPS 6". ACM SIGAda Ada Letters. 6 (1): 22–28. doi:10.1145/382256.382794. S2CID16337448.
Newsletter. DDC Ada Compiler Retargeter's Group. Vol.1. November 1985.
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Newsletter. DDC Ada Compiler Retargeter's Group. Vol.3. December 1986.
Fergany, Adel; Szewerenko, Leland; Rabinowitz, Moshe; Solomon, Eliezer N.; Pitarys, Marc; Benjamin, Clive L. "The implementation of asynchronous entry calls on two different architectures". NAECON 1993: Proceedings of the IEEE 1993 National Aerospace and Electronics Conference, May 24–28, 1993. pp.486–495.
Fitzgerald, John S.; Larsen, Peter Gorm; Verhoef, Marcel (2009). "Vienna Development Method". In Wah, Benjamin W. (ed.). Wiley Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering. Wiley. pp.2971–2982.
Frost, Jacob. "An Ada95 Solution for Certification of Embedded Safety Critical Applications". Reliable Software Technologies – Ada-Europe '99. pp.52–63.
George, Chris. "The RAISE Specification Language: A Tutorial". VDM '91: Formal Software Development Methods: 4th International Symposium of VDM Europe, Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, October 1991, Proceedings. Vol.2. Springer-Verlag. pp.238–319.
Ibsen, Leif (January 1984). "A portable virtual machine for Ada". Software: Practice and Experience. 14 (1): 17–29. doi:10.1002/spe.4380140104. S2CID206508565.
Jorgensen, Jesper. "A Comparison of the Object Oriented Features of Ada 9X and C++". Ada-Europe '93: 12th Ada-Europe International Conference, Paris, France, June 14–18, 1993. Proceedings. pp.125–141.
Mancusi, Richard; Tokar, Joyce L.; Rabinowitz, Moshe; Solomon, Eliezer N.; Pitarys, Marc; Benjamin, Clive L. "Real and Virtual Interrupt Support: The Mapping of a CARTS Feature to Two Different Architectures". Ada-Europe '93: 12th Ada-Europe International Conference, Paris, France, June 14–18, 1993. Proceedings. pp.314–329.
Møller, Peter Lützen. "Run-time check elimination for Ada 9X". Proceedings of the conference on TRI-Ada '94, November 6–11, 1994. Association for Computing Machinery. pp.122–128.
Rehmer, Karl (2009). "The HADS Team". In Stellman, Andrew; Greene, Jennifer (eds.). Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders. Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly. pp.299–312.
Schilling, Jonathan L. "Use of Ada in a Commercial, Small Company Environment". WADAS '93 Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Washington Ada symposium on Ada: June 28 – July 1, 1993. ACM. pp.89–94.
Schilling, Jonathan L.; Nielsen, Johan Olmütz (May–June 1994). "Automatic compiler recognition of monitor tasks". ACM SIGAda Ada Letters. 14 (3): 91–104. doi:10.1145/181468.181474. S2CID17557993.
Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, and object-oriented high-level programming language, inspired by Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for design by contract (DbC), extremely strong typing, explicit concurrency, tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors. Ada is an international technical standard, jointly defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). As of May 2023, the standard, called Ada 2022 informally, is ISO/IEC 8652:2023.
VxWorks is a real-time operating system developed as proprietary software by Wind River Systems, a subsidiary of Aptiv. First released in 1987, VxWorks is designed for use in embedded systems requiring real-time, deterministic performance and in many cases, safety and security certification for industries such as aerospace, defense, medical devices, industrial equipment, robotics, energy, transportation, network infrastructure, automotive, and consumer electronics.
In computer science, formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, development, analysis, and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expectation that, as in other engineering disciplines, performing appropriate mathematical analysis can contribute to the reliability and robustness of a design.
The Architecture Neutral Distribution Format (ANDF) in computing is a technology allowing common "shrink wrapped" binary application programs to be distributed for use on conformant Unix systems, translated to run on different underlying hardware platforms. ANDF was defined by the Open Software Foundation and was expected to be a "truly revolutionary technology that will significantly advance the cause of portability and open systems", but it was never widely adopted.
Nucleus RTOS is a real-time operating system (RTOS) produced by the Embedded Software Division of Mentor Graphics, a Siemens Business, supporting 32- and 64-bit embedded system platforms. The operating system (OS) is designed for real-time embedded systems for medical, industrial, consumer, aerospace, and Internet of things (IoT) uses. Nucleus was released first in 1993. The latest version is 3.x, and includes features such as power management, process model, 64-bit support, safety certification, and support for heterogeneous computing multi-core system on a chip (SOCs) processors.
Green Hills Software is a privately owned company that builds operating systems and programming tools for embedded systems. The firm was founded in 1982 by Dan O'Dowd and Carl Rosenberg. Its headquarters are in Santa Barbara, California.
Wind River Systems, also known as Wind River, is an Alameda, California–based company, subsidiary of Aptiv PLC. The company develops embedded system and cloud software consisting of real-time operating systems software, industry-specific software, simulation technology, development tools and middleware.
FreeRTOS is a real-time operating system kernel for embedded devices that has been ported to 35 microcontroller platforms. It is distributed under the MIT License.
Eclipse ThreadX is a highly deterministic, embedded real-time operating system (RTOS) programmed mostly in the language C.
Baget RTOS is a real-time operating system developed by the Scientific Research Institute of System Development of the Russian Academy of Sciences for a MIPS architecture and Intel board support packages (BSPs). Baget is intended for software execution in a hard real-time embedded systems (firmware).
PikeOS is a commercial hard real-time operating system (RTOS) which features a separation kernel-based hypervisor. This hypervisor supports multiple logical partition types for various operating systems (OS) and applications, each referred to as a GuestOS. PikeOS is engineered to support the creation of certifiable smart devices for the Internet of Things (IoT), ensuring compliance with industry standards for quality, safety, and security across various sectors. In instances where memory management units (MMU) are not present but memory protection units (MPU) are available on controller-based systems, PikeOS for MPU is designed for critical real-time applications and provides up-to-standard safety and security.
TI-RTOS is an embedded tools ecosystem created and offered by Texas Instruments (TI) for use across a range of their embedded system processors. It includes a real-time operating system (RTOS) component-named TI-RTOS Kernel, networking connectivity stacks, power management, file systems, instrumentation, and inter-processor communications like DSP/BIOS Link. It is free and open-source software, released under a BSD license.
The Airplane Information Management System (AIMS) is the "brains" of Boeing 777 aircraft. It uses four ARINC 629 buses to transfer information. There are 2 cabinets on each plane.
SYSGO GmbH is a German information technologies company that supplies operating systems and services for embedded systems with high safety and security-related requirements, using Linux. For security-critical applications, the company offers the Hypervisor and RTOS PikeOS, an operating system for multicore processors and the foundation for intelligent devices in the Internet of Things (IoT).
MQX is a real-time operating system (RTOS) developed by Precise Software Technologies, Inc., and currently sold by Synopsys, Embedded Access, Inc., and NXP Semiconductors.
ETAS GmbH is a German company which designs tools for the development of embedded systems for the automotive industry and other sectors of the embedded industry. ETAS is 100-percent subsidiary of Robert Bosch GmbH.
Dansk Datamatik Center (DDC) was a Danish software research and development centre that existed from 1979 to 1989. Its main purpose was to demonstrate the value of using modern techniques, especially those involving formal methods, in software design and development.
Tartan Laboratories, Inc., later renamed Tartan, Inc., was an American software company founded in 1981 and based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that specialized in programming language compilers, especially for the language Ada. It was based on work initially done at Carnegie Mellon University and gradually shifted from a focus on research and contract work to being more product-oriented. It was sold to Texas Instruments in 1996. Part of it was later acquired by DDC-I in 1998.
TLD Systems, Ltd. was an American software company active in the 1980s and 1990s and based in Torrance, California, that specialized in language compilers for the JOVIAL and Ada programming languages that were targeted to embedded systems.
Verdix Corporation was an American software company active in the 1980s and 1990s and based in Fairfax County, Virginia, that specialized in language compilers for the Ada programming language.
1 2 "DDC International Acquires Cross Tools Business of InterACT; Forms New Business Unit" (Press release). DDC-I. October 4, 1991.
↑ Schilling and Nielsen, "Automatic compiler recognition of monitor tasks", pp. 91, 100–102.
↑ Mancusi et al., "Real and Virtual Interrupt Support: The Mapping of a CARTS Feature to Two Different Architectures".
↑ Fergany et al., "The implementation of asynchronous entry calls on two different architectures".
↑ "DDC International News". DDC International A/S. Summer 1992.
↑ "Ada Validated Compilers List". Ada Information Clearinghouse. July 1, 1992. pp.8–10.
1 2 Bundgaard, Jørgen (November 17, 1992). A Practical Approach to Applying the Object Model to Construction of an Ada 9X Compiler System (Report). DDC-I.
↑ Bundgaard, "An ANDF based Ada 95 compiler system", p. 436.
↑ Ada and Beyond: Software Policies for the Department of Defense. Committee on the Past and Present Contexts for the Use of Ada in the Department of Defense, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council. 1997. p.11.
↑ Schilling, "Use of Ada in a Commercial, Small Company Environment", pp. 89, 93.
↑ Jorgensen, "A Comparison of the Object Oriented Features of Ada 9X and C++", pp. 140–141.
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