Robins Air Force Base selects DDC-I for AC-130U software support

PHOENIX, 27 Aug. 2008.The U.S. Air Force Warner Robins Air Logistics Center has selected DDC-I, a supplier of development tools for safety-critical applications, to assist with the USAF's organic refresh and support effort for the C130's avionics software. The USAF will use DDC-I's Open Arbor products to replace legacy MIPS and 1750A Ada compilers, says a representative. As part of the compiler evaluation, the USAF has migrated one of the avionics applications to DDC-I's OpenArbor development environment.

"The Air Force has traditionally outsourced its support to contractors," says Bob Morris, president and CEO of DDC-I. "Now they are creating their own 'organic' software teams to save costs and reduce turn-around times."

OpenArbor is a mixed-language, object-oriented IDE for developing and deploying real-time, safety-critical applications. The core environment combines optimizing compilers and libraries for C and Embedded C++ with the SCORE mixed-language debugger. The SCORE debugger features a multiwindow GUI, project management support, and automated build/make utilities.

SCORE's symbolic debugger recognizes C/EC++, Ada, and Fortran syntax and expressions, and can view objects, expressions, call chains, execution traces, interspersed machine code, machine registers, and program stacks.

OpenArbor provides a separate Eclipse plug-in for Ada development. Known as SCORE-Ada, this plug-in features an optimizing Ada compiler and run-time environment optimized for safety-critical embedded Ada projects. The SCORE-Ada debugger supports full Ada-level debugging, including constraints, attributes, tasking, exceptions, break-on-exception, and break-on-tasking events.