MDA Selects AdaCore’s GNAT Pro Assurance Development Platform for International Space Station Software

NEW YORK and PARIS and BURLINGTON, Mass., November 15, 2017 – AdaCore Tech Days – AdaCore today announced that MDA, a business unit of Maxar Technologies, has selected the GNAT Pro Assurance Ada development environment for the LEON3 target processor, to produce the software for a Ku-Band communication subsystem that will replace the current version. This critical International Space Station (ISS) subsystem has to work reliably over the long term, a requirement that led MDA to maintain Ada as the implementation language. With GNAT Pro Assurance, a service known as sustained branches allows MDA to continue developing and maintaining their software over the long term using a specific version of the GNAT Pro technology, with access to code generator updates to correct critical issues.

The replacement Ku-Band subsystem, known as the Space to Ground Transmitter Receiver Controller (SGTRC) will interface with the existing International Space Station (ISS) Space-to-Ground Antenna, previously provided by MDA. The project includes a prototype and test unit. The new SGTRC communication subsystem will support the long-term mission of the ISS and ensure the reliability and availability of high speed data connections between the ISS, Mission Control Centers and science laboratories on the ground.

A number of tools in the GNAT Pro Assurance product can help MDA meet their project’s goals.  These include the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) tailorable Integrated Development Environment (IDE), static analysis tools for stack usage computation (gnatstack) and code metrics calculation (gnatmetric), an emulator (gnatemulator) that in effect executes LEON3 target code on the host, a testing harness generator (gnattest), and many others, backed by expert support provided by the AdaCore product developers themselves.

“We have elected to reuse the majority of the original source code for the SGTRC replacement in its original language of Ada as a conservative design choice,” said Bryan Tracy, Software Lead for the SGTRC Replacement program.  “Partnering with AdaCore enables us to do this with increased confidence and efficiency.”

“Ada and AdaCore have a long and successful history in space applications in general, and with MDA in particular,” said Jamie Ayre, Commercial Team Lead at AdaCore. “We're pleased to see that history continued with MDA's selection of GNAT Pro Assurance for their critical ISS communication subsystem.”

About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore supplies software development and verification tools for mission-critical, safety-critical and security-critical systems. Four flagship products highlight the company’s offerings:

• The GNAT Pro development environment for Ada, a complete toolset for designing, implementing, and managing applications that demand high reliability and maintainability,
• The CodePeer advanced static analysis tool, an automatic Ada code reviewer and validator that can detect and eliminate errors both during development and retrospectively on existing software,
• The SPARK Pro verification environment, a toolset based on formal methods and oriented toward high-assurance systems, and
• The QGen model-based development tool suite for safety-critical control systems, providing a qualifiable and customizable code generator and static verifier for Simulink^® and Stateflow^® models, and a model-level debugger.

Over the years customers have used AdaCore products to field and maintain a wide range of critical applications in domains such as commercial avionics, automotive, railway, space, military systems, air traffic management/control, medical devices and financial services. AdaCore has an extensive and growing worldwide customer base; see www.adacore.com/industries/ for further information.

AdaCore products are open source and come with expert online support provided by the developers themselves. The company has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com/

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