Major European Aerospace Company Chooses GNAT Pro Ada Targeted to Wind River's VxWorks 6.x Cert RTOS on PowerPC

AdaCore, a trusted provider of software development and verification tools, today announced that Airbus Helicopters (France) has selected the GNAT Pro tool suite and the Ada programming language to develop new software components for the VSR700 prototype project. VSR700 is Airbus Helicopters' tactical unmanned aerial system (UAS) designed to meet the demanding requirements of global navies and armies in the 21st century.

Airbus Helicopters selected AdaCore's GNAT Pro Ada for PowerPC VxWorks 6.x/Cert based on several criteria, including ease of integration into the existing development infrastructure, the ability to develop monitoring algorithms, and the capacity to help certify the software up to DO-178C Design Assurance Level B.

"We selected AdaCore and the Ada language because we believe that this technology and related tools will increase the maintainability and quality of our software and make it easier to provide some evidence for certain software certification objectives," said Matthieu Vatinet, Head of Embedded Software Products, Airbus Helicopters. "The quality of AdaCore's support was an important advantage, and another anticipated benefit was the ease of developing mature code."

"Knowing that the Airbus Helicopters team needed to develop highly reliable and safe code for their VSR700 prototype project, we were extremely pleased that they selected Ada and AdaCore," said Jamie Ayre, Commercial Director at AdaCore. "The GNAT Pro Ada tool suite offers exceptional verification abilities that will help Airbus to detect problems early in their development process when they are easiest and least costly to correct. And our support services will address any questions or issues that may arise."

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, a complete toolset for designing, implementing, and managing applications that demand high reliability and maintainability. GNAT Pro is available for Ada and also for C and C++.
• The CWE-Compatible 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. CodePeer can detect a number of the "Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors" in the MITRE Corporation's Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE).
• The SPARK Pro verification environment, a toolset providing full formal verification oriented toward high-assurance systems with stringent security requirements.
• The QGen model-based development tool suite for safety-critical control systems, providing a qualifiable and customizable code generator and static verifier for a safe subset of 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 and military avionics, automotive, railway, space, defense 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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