High-integrity software tooling experts, AdaCore, are delighted to announce the introduction of the Ada and SPARK programming languages into the automotive market. Together with their partner NVIDIA, they are set to publish an off-the-shelf reference process, allowing others to follow their lead.
NVIDIA developed Drive® OS, the reference operating system and associated software stack designed specifically for developing and deploying autonomous vehicle applications on DRIVE AGX-based hardware.
This system includes software components that comply with the highest levels of integrity of the automotive certification standard ISO-26262. To achieve that effort, NVIDIA selected these languages to develop some of the most critical components of its software stack. This required establishing a development process that takes advantage of formal methods and other safety characteristics of Ada and SPARK, thus fully leveraging their capabilities.
AdaCore and NVIDIA have decided to publish this reference process freely as an open-source and evolving document, allowing the industry at large to adopt Ada and SPARK.
“As the added value of the automotive industry turns more and more from mechanical to software features, achieving software safety at the highest levels becomes one of the most critical challenges of modern car development,” says Quentin Ochem, Chief Product and Revenue Officer at AdaCore. “NVIDIA demonstrates truly remarkable technical leadership in the domain by introducing Ada and SPARK into its development process and allowing the rest of the community to follow its path.”
The ISO-26262 reference process is available on https://nvidia.github.io/spark-process/ or https://github.com/NVIDIA/spark-process and can be used or customized freely by anyone interested in adopting these languages.