DO-178B compliance for avionics software aided by new software tool from LDRA and Altium

Posted by John McHale
WIRRAL, England, 16 April 2011. LDRA and Altium engineers are integrating the LDRA tool suite and Altium's TASKING VX-toolset for C166 microcontroller to bring compliance to industry safety standards such as automotive's MISRA, industrial's IEC 61508, and the avionicsDO-178B standard to small-footprint microcontrollers like Infineon's C166 family. The combined solution maximizes code reuse and process compliance for safety- and mission-critical software across automotive, industrial, and avionics markets.
Seamless integration between the TASKING compiler and the LDRA tool suite avoids tedious configuration challenges and enables developers to easily apply LDRA's analysis and testing capabilities from within TASKING's integrated development environment (IDE), LDRA officials say. With a simple right click in TASKING's IDE, developers can directly invoke LDRA analysis phases, gaining access to static analysis violations and code coverage, or quickly generate test cases, executing code on the target or TASKING simulator. Via complete integration, all LDRA tool suite capabilities -- from analysis to verification -- can aid the TASKING developer in achieving certification compliance.
"Today's customer is increasingly asked to certify applications that deliver more functionality within a shorter development cycle," says Harm-Andre Verhoef, product panager at Altium BV. "Automated software testing tools like those of LDRA deliver standard compliance and scalable solutions that test the applications on the target microcontroller no matter how small the footprint. Such capabilities ensure that automotive giants such as Daimler or industrial players like Siemens can meet their time-to-market goals within budget constraints."
"Code reuse has become a fundamental way to cut development costs in today's tight economy," says Ian Hennell, LDRA operations director. "Thanks to this integration, application developers using TASKING's toolset can port code between standards, platforms and markets while maintaining superior code quality because of the scalability of the LDRA tool suite. This represents significant cost savings and superior ROI in choosing this combined solution, whether for medical, automotive, or industrial applications."
The integration with LDRA's eXtreme Testing, the tool suite's automatic test case generator, removes the time-consuming, error-prone process of test generation for TASKING-based applications, LDRA officials say. Building on LDRA's automated unit testing tool TBrun, eXtreme Testing automatically populates unit test cases to the point of generating the test cases themselves.
Under the LDRA tool suite, compliance for one standard or platform can be scaled to another. Users developing for the automotive market, for example, can therefore sell the same component solution into industrial or avionics environments, simply adding the verification tasks required for the new environment, LDRA officials say.
The TASKING toolset -- IDE, compiler and simulator -- is built on the Eclipse framework. This modular framework ensures that the integration is kept up to date and able to support processors as they are added to the TASKING VX-toolset.