Aldec, HighRely and Leading FPGA Vendors Establish DO-254 Ecosystem

HENDERSON, Nevada –September 13, 2010– Aldec, Inc., an EDA leader in FPGA and ASIC Verification and HighRely Inc., industry-leading DO-254/DO-178B avionics development and engineering services company, announce the establishment of a DO-254 ecosystem, including Aldec, HighRely and industry leading programmable logic vendors: Actel® (NASDAQ:ACTL), Altera® (NASDAQ:ALTR) and Xilinx® (NASDAQ:XLNX). Aldec and HighRely provide a comprehensive certifiable DO-254 solution which covers the entire front-end and back-end of DO-254 compliance requirements for any DO-254 program that requires in hardware programmable logic validation. Aldec DO-254 at-speed in-hardware verification solution has been adopted at five global avionics companies over the last nine months and helped those organizations achieve Level A and B compliance all of which included programmable logic devices.

Partnering with HighRely will extend the reach of Aldec’s current industry proven DO-254 compliance solution and provide customers with access to HighRely’s highly popular JumpCert-254 solution which includes dedicated DO-254 RelyTRACE traceability tool, RelyCHECK DO-254 processes/checklists, DO-254 training services, gap analysis and DER certification support. Zbyszek Zalewski, General Manager of Aldec , Inc. Hardware Business Unit said, “Our end goal is to provide our existing and new customers full support of DO-254 compliant tools, training and services. We want to help and guide them to attain DO-254 compliance and certification for their DO-254 project from start to finish avoiding common confusion, pitfalls and mistakes.”

Mr. Tony Baghai, Co-founder of HighRely said “Costly mistakes result from lack of understanding, planning and applying DO-254’s true intent which can actually be very cost-effective when executed properly. DO-254 compliance will be straightforward if the right tools and expertise is applied.” He added “the activities related to development and certification of hardware can improve the quality, reliability and maintainability of product, if done properly. HighRely’s JumpCert-254 is the world’s most popular DO-254 jumpstart to DO-254 in use at dozens of companies today. The integration with Aldec’s best-in-class tools was an easy decision and a win-win for everyone, particularly all the avionics developers requiring DO-254 compliance.”

The establishment of the DO-254 Ecosystem is the beginning of a larger expansion of the Aldec DO-254 solution in order to meet customers’ requirements for a front to back-end solution which achieves DO-254 compliance. The Ecosystem is currently supported by the three largest programmable logic device vendors Actel, Altera and Xilinx.

Actel® has a 25-year history of providing programmable digital logic solutions to the military and aerospace design community. Actel offers high-reliability products, such as the RT ProASIC®3, RTAX-S/SL, and RTAX-DSP product families (for space applications) and the ProASIC3 and ProASIC3EL families, which have successfully been

deployed in commercial avionics applications with DO-254 certification to Design Assurance Levels A and B. Actel's extensive portfolio of industry-proven IP cores and best-in-class software tools address the design challenges and needs of emerging military and aerospace applications. Many Actel products are available with military temperature screening (plastic and ceramic packages) or MIL-STD-883 Class B processing (ceramic packages only). For more information: http://www.actel.com/products/solutions/milaero/DO254.aspx 

Altera® launched the FPGA industry’s first DO-254 development environment for safety-critical solutions and services to companies requiring DO-254 compliance in their avionics systems. Offering DO-254 certifiable solutions enable customers to quickly approve and implement Altera’s FPGAs, HardCopy® ASIC, intellectual property (IP) cores and Nios II embedded processor into their avionics and military applications. Altera’s solutions focus on DO-254 levels A, B, C and D compliance. For more information on Altera’s DO-254 development environment visit http://www.altera.com/end-markets/military-aerospace/do-254/mil-do-254.html 

HighRelyAs North America’s largest and fastest-growing avionics certification/engineering company, HighRely has perfected the art of helping new customers become proficient and successful with DO-254. HighRely offers JumpCertTM as a pre-packaged set of products and services to jump-start, automate, augment, and finalize DO-254 product certification. JumpCertTM provides complete control of the DO-254 project with a fully customized set of products and services including any combination of the following:

• DO-254 Training: On-site or off-site, 9,000+ trained: more than all competitors combined.
• DO-254 Process Documentation Templates
• DO-254 Checklists via RELYCHECK
• DO-254 Gap Analysis: What are the gaps in your process and what can be re-used?
• Tool Recommendations: Which 3rd party COTS tools should you use?
• Certification Strategy: Specific recommendations to achieve certification
• Engineering Services: Requirements, design and code, testing and on-site/off-site engineering.
• DER Services: FAA registered Designated Engineering Representatives (DERs) by HighRely.
• RelyTRACE: the DO-17B and DO-254 Compliant Traceability Tool.
• RelyCheck: The DO-178B and DO-254 Compliant Automated Checklists Tool.

For more information: http://highrely.com/JumpCert.php 

Xilinx® offers the broadest portfolio of COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) solutions with a migration path to defense, and space-grade field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The portfolio includes silicon devices supporting a wide range of operating temperatures and processing levels, from commercial specification in Virtex-6, Spartan®-6 and Spartan-3A FPGAs, to radiation tolerance meeting Class-V requirements in the Virtex®-5Q and Virtex-4QV families, as well as the recently announced rad-hard Virtex-5QV family for space applications. Xilinx avionics solutions include comprehensive tools, papers, and data packages to address key market needs such as DO-254 and NSEU. For more information: http://www.xilinx.com/esp/aerospace-defense/avionics.htm 

Aldec DO-254/CTS™

DO-254/CTS™ (Compliance Tool Set) provides customers the tools to comprehensively verify the FPGA designs in the HDL simulator first, and then prove all the same tests in the target device. Aldec can replay RTL simulation in the real hardware environment with the same flexibility, traceability and coverage. Aldec’s methodology involves reusing final behavioral testbench as test inputs for In-Hardware verification. In doing so, customers do not spend months developing test inputs for hardware verification anymore, reducing development costs. DO-254/CTS mainly consists of a Mother Board and a Customized Daughter Board. The Mother Board drives all the test vectors into the target FPGA located in the Daughter Board that is fully customized specific to the design under test. DO-254/CTS provides one automated testing environment for seamless verification of the design against all requirements. The DO-254/CTS is based on Aldec’s HES™ (Hardware Emulation System) technology that provides simulation acceleration, emulation and ASIC prototyping in FPGA boards. HES system was released in 2003, and based on the 5,479,355 and 7,003,746 US patents. For more information and an interactive video presentation visit http://www.aldec.com/presentations/DO-254.html

About Aldec

Aldec Incorporated is an industry-leader in Electronic Design Verification and offers a patented technology suite including: RTL Design, RTL Simulators, Hardware-Assisted Verification, Design Rule Checking, IP Cores, DO-254 Functional Verification and Military/Aerospace solutions. Corporate Website: www.aldec.com