The news that the former Systems Designers Plc had a joint venture with DEC to develop Ada cross-compilers caused a flurry of excitement in the City, and now successor company SD-Scicon Plc has reached the point where it is ready to start field trials of the XD Ada cross-compilers next month. The partners hope that XD Ada will become the definitive toolset for embedded aplications. It runs on any DEC VAX under VMS, and is initially designed for creating embedded code for the Motorola 68020 and Mil-Std 1750A microprocessors.