AdaCore Expands GNAT Pro Offerings to All Current VxWorks Platforms

GNAT Pro now available for Wind River’s VxWorks 653, VxWorks MILS, VxWorks DO-178B, and VxWorks 6.7, including both AMP and SMP configurations

SAN DIEGO, NEW YORK and PARIS, June 1, 2009 - Avionics USA - AdaCore, a leading supplier of Ada development tools and support services, today announced the availability of GNAT Pro on all active versions of Wind River’s VxWorks real-time operating system. This list includes VxWorks 5, VxWorks 6, supporting both asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configurations, VxWorks 653, VxWorks DO-178B, and VxWorks MILS. GNAT Pro now gives Ada users the widest selection of VxWorks platforms to choose from, whether for new programs or for migration of existing codebases to newer operating systems. In addition, all Wind River platforms supporting deployment in DO-178B certified environments are also supported.

The GNAT Pro product offering for VxWorks satisfies a wide variety of customer application requirements and deployment environments. GNAT Pro for VxWorks 5 and 6 are suitable for general-purpose software development. The specialized GNAT Pro High-Integrity Edition for DO-178B, available for the VxWorks 653 and VxWorks DO-178B Platforms, is targeted to RTCA DO-178B and IEC 61508 safety-critical systems.

For safety-certified environments, AdaCore’s GNAT Pro High-Integrity Edition supports three specific runtime environments that optimize size, performance, and certification effort.

  • 1. The zero-foot-print (ZFP) library simplifies safety certification for sequential applications.
  • 2. The Ravenscar library adds support for tasking or multi-processing.
  • 3. The Cert library adds ARINC653 awareness and supports advanced integrated modular avionics (IMA) features like inter-process or inter-partition communication and synchronization.

These certification libraries are used as a part of multiple DO-178B Level A certified systems.

GNAT Pro is also available for VxWorks 6, supporting both symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) multicore implementation models. This capability allows customers to deploy Ada on advanced multicore processors, and enables high levels of optimization for a variety of challenging multiprocessor designs and configurations.

AdaCore’s GNAT Pro product for VxWorks MILS brings a powerful application development environment to the aerospace and defense industry for developing Ada applications within a MILS (multiple independent levels of security) architecture.

GNAT Pro for VxWorks MILS combines with SPARK Pro (an Integrated Development Environment combined with the SPARK language tool set) to support security certification of user applications or their components to Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 5 and higher. SPARK is an Ada subset extended with a contract language that allows a program’s specification to be precisely expressed and verified. It directly supports semi-formal and formal methods as required by EAL 5 and higher, and has a strong track record for both safety-critical and high-security systems. An example of the latter is the NSA-sponsored Tokeneer project (see: http://www.adacore.com/2008/10/06/nsa-releases-secure-software-project-to-open-source-community/)

“Ada is an important technology for Wind River aerospace and defense customers, and AdaCore leads the way in providing Ada toolsets across the full spectrum of VxWorks platforms,” said Rob Hoffman, Vice President and General Manager of Aerospace and Defense at Wind River.“ Ada is well suited for the high-integrity domains that we target, and we are pleased to see GNAT Pro available for our newest products, including VxWorks 6.7 and VxWorks MILS.”

“Wind River’s platforms are a key market for AdaCore, so we placed a high priority on making GNAT Pro available on all the latest versions of VxWorks,” said Robert Dewar, President and CEO of AdaCore." And our new support for VxWorks MILS, in particular the SPARK Pro tool set, provides a unique capability of creating applications suitable for medium to high assurance deployment. AdaCore’s SPARK Pro tool set is the only program analysis tool to directly help developers certify their high assurance applications in MILS architectures.”

About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, a state-of-the-art programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore's flagship product is the GNAT Pro development environment, which comes with expert on-line support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has an extensive world-wide customer base; see http://www.AdaCore.com/home/company/customers/ for further information.

Ada and GNAT Pro see a growing usage in high-integrity and safety-certified applications, including commercial aircraft avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, railroad systems, and medical devices, and in security-sensitive domains such as financial services.

AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.AdaCore.com

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