Electronic Data Systems Corp’s EDS-Scicon Ltd has unveiled the fruit of its joint research venture with Digital Equipment Corp – the XD Ada CPU32 compiler. The system is designed around Motorola Inc’s CPU32 microcontroller (a member of the MC68300 family) in combination with the Ada programming language. Ada has traditionally been the preserve of military systems developers, but Scicon is confident that its new compiler will stimulate interest from the the commercial embedded systems market. Indeed the company has already received a vote of confidence courtesy of the Boeing Commercial Airplane Group which is to use XD Ada CPU32 in the cabin management system of its new passenger airliner, the Boeing 777. The system will provide electronic services for flight attendants and passengers with each of up to 440 seats on the plane being able to access flight information, movie selection and air-to-ground telephones. Scicon believes that the demand for increasingly complex embedded systems is necessitating the use of more powerful and structured programming languages like Ada.
Ada offers advantages
It claims that Ada offers advantages over C and C++ in respect of reliability, particularly for safety-or-event-critical systems, EDS contends, and is capable of generating highly compact code. It is this compression factor, along with Ada’s built-in run-time and multi-tasking capabilities that will gen-erate custom according to EDS-Scicon Defence Products Group sales and marketing manager Ian Pascoe. The legislative weight thrown behind the language, which has long been the standard for the American defence industry, and which is gaining increasing recognition in Europe, where it of course originated, is also considered an advantage. The MC68300 chip family has proved especially suitable for communications applications such as mobile telephones and digital switching – there is a multi-proticol variant in the family – and also for engine management systems in vehicles, and Scicon says it is courting between 20 and 30 customers in these fields, alongside defence, radar and railway signalling companies. A licence for the compiler costs UKP5,000 making it the choice of those preferring quality to economy, as Scicon admits (it are keen to stress that the system has undergone DEC’s rigorous three month testing procedure). The cross-compilation system runs under DEC’s VAX/VMS operating system to generate the code for the target 68300, and it will be available in the US and Europe through Scicon and DEC.
