IBM Japan, VaST team for electronics virtualization in embedded systems sw
"Customers in the automotive, mobile, and consumer electronics industries are facing an embedded software complexity crisis and they are looking for innovative solutions that provide competitive advantage. IBM Japan and IBCS deliver proven innovative process development solutions that are a natural complement to VaST virtualization solutions," noted Alain Labat, CEO of VaST Systems.
By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- EDN, September 16, 2008
IBM Japan Ltd and VaST Systems Technology recently agreed to jointly promote model-based development by electronics device virtualization for their major manufacturing customers in automotive and digital consumer electronics industries.
Given that automotive systems and digital consumer electronics require huge investments in verification activities at various development stages, and because specification and design changes affect software, hardware, and costs, verification efforts must cover the entire system and be conducted rapidly to meet schedule constraints, VaST explained.
In the area of mechanical design, model-based development has been used to virtually model components and verify with virtual models without using real hardware, while in the automotive space, it is now possible to commence commercial production by creating virtual models instead of physical prototypes of the vehicle.
However, due to increase in speed and complexity of electronic circuits, it has been difficult to virtualize electronics control devices while maintaining execution speed and accuracy, but VaST believes it’s CoMET and METeor tools allow the combination of high speed, and cycle accuracy to solve this problem.
VaST noted that its tools allow for virtual system model creation, simulation, and software development in order to reduce development time by 30 to 60% and cost for embedded systems.
By adopting model-based development, VaST believes software developers will be more productive as a result of greater visibility into the execution and state of the hardware as the software development process itself will be improved by removing the dependency on hardware or hardware prototype availability to allow software development.
The integration verification upon hardware availability can be shortened: compared with conventional methods using real hardware, it takes several weeks for integration verification, but with model-based development, that can be reduced to a few hours to a few days because additional errors are not found at the final verification stage.
IBM Japan said it supports VaST’s virtualization technologies to improve the development process and will jointly promote model-based development with VaST.
As the first step, IBM Business Consulting Services KK (IBCS) will add VaST's CoMET and METeor tools to their offerings and provide consulting services in the embedded systems market.
IBCS said it aims to help customers reduce their test workload by allowing the reuse of software assets as well as improving verification quality.
"Customers in the automotive, mobile, and consumer electronics industries are facing an embedded software complexity crisis and they are looking for innovative solutions that provide competitive advantage. IBM Japan and IBCS deliver proven innovative process development solutions that are a natural complement to VaST virtualization solutions," concluded Alain Labat, CEO of VaST Systems, in a statement.
