Open code generation tool cuts design time & effort

27th January 2015

AdaCore

Barney Scott

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During the last 10 years, model-based design environments have proved to be a significant innovation for developers of embedded control software. However, in safety-critical domains such as avionics, rail, and automotive systems, current off-the-shelf approaches raise several issues with respect to software verification.

QGen, a model verification and code generation tool from AdaCore, helps reduce the effort in developing, verifying and certifying safety critical-solutions with Simulink, MISRA C and SPARK.

“How can I easily improve my generated code to exploit processor facilities for fast, vectorised operations on matrices or complex numbers?”

“How can I generate a function call to a pre-certified library for a specific Simulink block?”

“How can I make sure that the tool’s source code generation is qualified and that the resulting object code complies with the necessary certification standard?”

Addressing the issues posed above is a major headache for control engineers, software engineers and tool experts alike, for several reasons. First and foremost, given the diverse needs of the various component providers and system integrators, closed/proprietary solutions are highly unlikely to fit smoothly in all contexts. Moreover, separating the code generation phase from conventional compilation, structural coverage analysis, and system integration drastically increases tool integration costs while complicating the certifiability of the generated code.

AdaCore's QGen tool is an open code-generation technology for Simulink models that precisely specifies the code that is generated for every Simulink element, with an extensive tool qualification suite that helps reduce certification costs for DO-178B / DO-178C, EN 50128, and ISO 26262.

Thanks to its open architecture, QGen allows users to easily tune the code generation strategy; it supports the use of processor libraries for arithmetic operations as well as user-specific implementations of Simulink blocks in the form of pre-certified external code libraries.

Finally, it can be easily integrated into AdaCore’s fully qualifiable verification and compilation tool chain, performing processor-in-the-loop structural coverage analysis up to MC/DC directly on the embedded executable and without any code instrumentation.

QGen is available now directly from AdaCore.