Esterel Technologies

Last updated
Esterel Technologies
Type Public
Industry Computer software
Founded Elancourt, France (1999) [1]
Headquarters France, United States
Key people
Eric Bantegnie, President and CEO [2]
ProductsScade Suite
Scade Display
Number of employees
+100 (2019)
Parent Ansys
Website www.esterel-technologies.com

Esterel Technologies is a supplier of model-based design, validation, and code generation tools for safety-critical software and hardware applications. Esterel's tools create formal specifications that produce control designs code in software and/or hardware.

Contents

Esterel Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ansys, Inc., has offices in Élancourt, France, and Mountain View, California. Esterel also has direct sales offices in Ottobrunn, Germany, Bracknell, United Kingdom, and Shanghai, P.R. China. Distributors in Japan, China, South Korea, Israel, and India complement the Esterel direct sales offices.

Products

The Esterel Technologies' SCADE Product Family includes: SCADE System, SCADE Suite, SCADE Display, and SCADE LifeCycle. SCADE Suite was acquired from Telelogic in 2001. [3]

In September 2006, Esterel Technologies acquired the IMAGE product from Thales and Diehl Aerospace. [4] It is now proposed as SCADE Display, [5] a display framework targeted for Real-time applications, for prototyping, display design, simulation, verification and validation, DO-178B certified code generation (up to level A), and integration with other applications.

In February 2007, Esterel Technologies announced a partnership with Wind River Systems to integrate SCADE in VxWorks 653 Real Time Operating System. [6]

History

Created in 2000, Esterel Technologies is a spin-off from the French company Simulog (itself bought by Astek in 2003). Simulog was itself a spin-off from INRIA, and many of the initial founders came from the INRIA laboratory. [7] These include Gerard Berry, father of the Esterel language, which gave its name to the company. Its first product, Esterel Studio, was meant to bring synchronous programming language benefits to the industry (initially telecommunications and then EDA Electronic design automation). In 2003, a Lustre-based (one of the other synchronous programming language) tool-set named SCADE (Safety Critical Application Development Environment) was bought by Esterel Technologies, and the two academics communities behind these languages proposed a way to merge them. [8] The result has been productized as SCADE Suite 6 and its subsequent versions.

In 2006, the tool developed by THALES to design the A380 cockpit, named IMAGE, was transferred to Esterel Technologies, and re-branded SCADE Display.

Later in 2009, Esterel Studio was acquired by Synfora. [9]

Finally, in 2012, it was announced that ANSYS had signed a definitive agreement to purchase Esterel for approximately €42 million. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VxWorks</span> Real-time operating system

VxWorks is a real-time operating system developed as proprietary software by Wind River Systems, a wholly-owned 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 and defense, medical devices, industrial equipment, robotics, energy, transportation, network infrastructure, automotive, and consumer electronics.

LS-DYNA

LS-DYNA is an advanced general-purpose multiphysics simulation software package developed by the former Livermore Software Technology Corporation (LSTC), which was acquired by Ansys in 2019. While the package continues to contain more and more possibilities for the calculation of many complex, real world problems, its origins and core-competency lie in highly nonlinear transient dynamic finite element analysis (FEA) using explicit time integration. LS-DYNA is used by the automobile, aerospace, construction and civil engineering, military, manufacturing, and bioengineering industries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PTC (software company)</span> U.S.-based software company

PTC Inc. is an American computer software and services company founded in 1985 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The global technology company has over 6,000 employees across 80 offices in 30 countries, 1,150 technology partners and over $1bn in revenue. The company began developing parametric, associative feature-based, solid computer-aided design (CAD) modeling software in 1988, including an Internet-based product for product lifecycle management (PLM) in 1998.

Esterel is a synchronous programming language for the development of complex reactive systems. The imperative programming style of Esterel allows the simple expression of parallelism and preemption. As a consequence, it is well suited for control-dominated model designs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ansys</span> American technology company

Ansys, Inc. is an American company based in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. It develops and markets CAE/multiphysics engineering simulation software for product design, testing and operation and offers its products and services to customers worldwide.

Lustre is a formally defined, declarative, and synchronous dataflow programming language for programming reactive systems. It began as a research project in the early 1980s. A formal presentation of the language can be found in the 1991 Proceedings of the IEEE. In 1993 it progressed to practical, industrial use in a commercial product as the core language of the industrial environment SCADE, developed by Esterel Technologies. It is now used for critical control software in aircraft, helicopters, and nuclear power plants.

Gérard Berry French computer scientist

Gérard Philippe Berry is a French computer scientist, member of the French Academy of Sciences, French Academy of Technologies, and Academia Europaea. He was the Chief Scientist Officer of Esterel Technologies from 2000 to 2009. He held the 2007-2008 yearly Liliane Bettencourt chair of Technological Innovation at the Collège de France. He was Director of Research at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis and held the 2009-2010 yearly Informatics and Digital Sciences chair at the Collège de France. Berry's work, which spans over more than 30 years, brought important contributions to three main fields:

ARINC 661 is a standard which aims to normalize the definition of a Cockpit Display System (CDS), and the communication between the CDS and User Applications (UA) which manage aircraft avionics functions. The GUI definition is completely defined in binary Definition Files (DF).

The Cockpit display systems provides the visible portion of the Human Machine Interface (HMI) by which aircrew manage the modern Glass cockpit and thus interface with the aircraft avionics.

Rational Rhapsody, a modeling environment based on UML, is a visual development environment for systems engineers and software developers creating real-time or embedded systems and software. Rational Rhapsody uses graphical models to generate software applications in various languages including C, C++, Ada, Java and C#.

Femap is an engineering analysis program sold by Siemens Digital Industries Software that is used to build finite element models of complex engineering problems ("pre-processing") and view solution results ("post-processing"). It runs on Microsoft Windows and provides CAD import, modeling and meshing tools to create a finite element model, as well as postprocessing functionality that allows mechanical engineers to interpret analysis results. The finite element method allows engineers to virtually model components, assemblies, or systems to determine behavior under a given set of boundary conditions, and is typically used in the design process to reduce costly prototyping and testing, evaluate differing designs and materials, and for structural optimization to reduce weight.

NESSUS is a general-purpose, probabilistic analysis program that simulates variations and uncertainties in loads, geometry, material behavior and other user-defined inputs to compute probability of failure and probabilistic sensitivity measures of engineered systems. Because NESSUS uses highly efficient and accurate probabilistic analysis methods, probabilistic solutions can be obtained even for extremely large and complex models. The system performance can be hierarchically decomposed into multiple smaller models and/or analytical equations. Once the probabilistic response is quantified, the results can be used to support risk-informed decisions regarding reliability for safety critical and one-of-a-kind systems, and to maintain a level of quality while reducing manufacturing costs for larger quantity products.

Rational Synergy is a software tool that provides software configuration management (SCM) capabilities for all artifacts related to software development including source code, documents and images as well as the final built software executable and libraries. Rational Synergy also provides the repository for the change management tool known as Rational Change. Together these two tools form an integrated configuration management and change management environment that is used in software development organizations that need controlled SCM processes and an understanding of what is in a build of their software.

Critical Software

Critical Software is a Portuguese international information systems and software company, headquartered in Coimbra. The company was established in 1998, from the University of Coimbra's business incubator and technology transfer centre, Instituto Pedro Nunes (IPN). The company has other offices in Porto and Lisbon (Portugal), Southampton, Munich (Germany) and California.

DDC-I, Inc. is a privately held company providing software development of real-time operating systems, software development tools, and software services for safety-critical embedded applications, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. It was first created in 1985 as the Danish firm DDC International A/S, a commercial outgrowth of Dansk Datamatik Center, a Danish software research and development organization of the 1980s. The American subsidiary was created in 1986. For many years, the firm specialized in language compilers for the programming language Ada.

The DiSTI Corporation is a company that provides software tools for the development of GUI software and 3D virtual training solutions for simulators and embedded systems.

SIGNAL is a programming language based on synchronized data-flow : a process is a set of equations on elementary flows describing both data and control.

AbsInt is a software-development tools vendor based in Saarbrücken, Germany. The company was founded in 1998 as a technology spin-off from the Department of Programming Languages and Compiler Construction of Prof. Reinhard Wilhelm at Saarland University. AbsInt specializes in software-verification tools based on abstract interpretation. Its tools are used worldwide by Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, government agencies and startups.

Cantata++, or simply Cantata in newer versions, is a commercial computer program for dynamic testing, specifically unit testing and integration testing, and code coverage at run time of C and C++ programs. It is developed and sold by QA Systems, and was formerly a product of IPL Information Processing Ltd.

References

  1. "History". esterel-technologies.com. Retrieved 2019-03-10.
  2. "Management Team". esterel-technologies.com. Retrieved 2019-03-10.
  3. "Telelogic sells the SCADE business unit to Esterel Technologies". cisionwire.com. 2001-10-30. Archived from the original on 2013-01-19. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  4. "Esterel Technologies acquires the IMAGE Embedded Graphical Display Software Design Environment from Thales and Diehl Aerospace". cisionwire.com. 2006. Retrieved 2010-11-07.
  5. "SCADE Display - HMI Software Design - Esterel Technologies". Esterel Technologies.
  6. "Wind River and Esterel Technologies Partner to Create New Safety-Critical Software Development Platform". Wind River Systems. 2007-02-13. Retrieved 2010-11-07.
  7. http://www.inria.fr/centre-de-recherche-inria/sophia-antipolis-mediterranee/innovation/start-up%5B%5D
  8. https://www.di.ens.fr/~pouzet/talks/slides-fac07.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  9. "Synopsys.com". Synfora Inc. Archived from the original on 2010-01-20. Retrieved 2011-01-12.
  10. Esterel + ANSYS will change an industry, http://www.corumgroup.com/Blog/esterel-ansys-will-change-industry