AdaCore Joins TOPCASED Project

PARIS and NEW YORK, October 29, 2007 - AdaCore, provider of the highest-quality Ada tools and support services, today announced its participation as a member of the TOPCASED Project (Toolkit in Open Source for Critical Applications & System Development).

Initiated in 2004, the TOPCASED Project brings together a consortium of commercial, scientific, and academic partners, ranging from consulting companies to large industrial groups, including Airbus, Thales, Siemens VDO, CNES, Rockwell Collins, EADS Astrium, CS, Atos, SOPRA, and many more. Its goal is to provide an open-source development environment for producing software that meets the requirements of safety-critical embedded systems. This major cooperative project, which will produce an environment covering the full spectrum of software development, from requirements specification to implementation, is being funded with the help of the French General Business Directorate, or DGE.

The complexity of embedded systems used in the avionics, space and transportation industries places unique demands on development tools, which the traditional off-the-shelf software market alone cannot fulfill. For example, the lifetime of aerospace products can often be as long as 10 to 30 years and, currently, no software products company can commit for such a prolonged period of time at a realistic cost.

To reach the necessary quality levels of safety-critical embedded systems and increase the productivity of developers, system engineering methods and tools need to be improved. By using an open-source approach, the TOPCASED Project hopes to ensure the availability of reliable tools over a long period of time, to share the development costs among all those involved, and to make use of valuable tools already available.

AdaCore is leveraging its experience in safety-critical and embedded software engineering to bring TOPCASED users an advanced Eclipse-based environment for developing Ada applications.

“AdaCore’s reputation in the open-source industry meant that we were keen to secure its participation in TOPCASED,” said Patrick Farail, Head of Software Development Methods Support, Airbus France. “We felt that AdaCore’s approach to embedded development for avionics, its history of working on large, complex and safety-critical projects, and the company’s impressive list of commercial and military avionics customers made it the perfect partner for the project,” he added.

“AdaCore understands the unique challenges of the embedded aerospace market, and we are excited to be an active member of TOPCASED, working with industrial and academic partners. Our company has a longstanding commitment to open-source, safety-critical, and embedded software development, as evidenced by our support for the Ada community,” said Nicolas Setton, AdaCore’s TOPCASED Project Manager.

Please see: http://www.topcased.org/ for further details about The TOPCASED Project.

About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, a modern programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore’s flagship product is GNAT Pro, which comes with expert online support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has a large world-wide customer base in high-integrity and safety-certified applications, including avionics, military systems, air traffic control, railroad systems, and financial services. See http://www.adacore.com/home/company/customers/ for more information. AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris.

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