A  new technology developed by engineers at the University of Leicester after over 12 years research promises to make safety a surety in equipment as diverse as cars, aircraft and medical equipment. The patented technology  has led to the development of a new software system family  RapidiTTy.   TTE Systems Ltd has been spun out from the University of Leicester to develop and market this.
 
Technical Manager, Dr. Devaraj Ayavoo said: “Surfing the Web and if it takes a few seconds longer than normal to access a particular page, won’t usually matter. Put your foot on the brakes in your car, you can’t afford to wait – you need to be sure that the brakes will work immediately.  Our job is to ensure that complex embedded systems always work correctly.”
 
Dr. Michael Pont, CEO of TTE Systems Ltd and Head of the Embedded Systems Laboratory at the University of Leicester, added: “Clearly there are many systems currently in use that are perfectly safe. However what is not easy at present is making systems safe and proving that they are safe.  Our technology makes it easier to develop systems with predictable behaviour - a key requirement for safe systems.
 
“In an industry that is geared at developing new systems very quickly, the development of predicable systems has often been ignored. It is in this area that we have specialised.
 
“Our work involves what are known as “time triggered” – or TT - designs.  With this technology in a TT design, we know in advance exactly what the embedded system will be doing at every moment of time during its execution. This is a highly innovative approach to system development.
 
“Our techniques can be applied in a very wide range of systems - even where safety is not critical.  In many consumer appliances – like washing machines, dishwashers, even DVD players – customers would welcome improved reliability.”
 
TTE Systems Ltd, created with support from the University Challenge Fund for the East Midlands  (the Lachesis Fund ),  has launched its first products in the RapidiTTy family which provides a complete, cost-effective, suite of software tools that support the rapid development and testing of a wide range of reliable embedded systems. 

The RapidiTTy tools build on a solid technical foundation of “time-triggered architectures” developed in the Embedded Systems Laboratory at the University of Leicester over a period of more than 12 years.  Laboratory
staff have an international reputation for their work in this area,with to date seven patent applications filed in connection with the technology.
 
Dr Pont says there is real potential for the systems developed at Leicester to make an international impact:
“Our tools make it very easy to incorporate our technology in "standard" development processes. Using time-triggered technology allows us to create low-cost tools which facilitate the rapid development of reliable embedded systems.  Our goal is to make reliability a cornerstone of mainstream development tools.”
 
“The design of embedded systems is often an extremely complicated process," adds Dr. Ayavoo. "Our users however have been amazed how easy RapidiTTy is to use.”
 
Following initial sales in Europe and the US, RapidiTTy FPGA is now on general public release. 
RapidiTTy FPGA provides extensive GDB-based debug support (e.g. breakpoints and single-step from C), fully integrated with the IDE, and minimises the effort involved in precise timing analysis (including worst-case execution time measurements). FPGA also provides a familiar, flexible IDE, helping to ease the transition between microcontroller- and FPGA-based development. Various licensing options are available with a typical package (including VHDL source for the PH 03 core) costing £1950 + VAT / seat.

RapidiTTy Builder accelerates TT software development for microcontrollers by simplifying and automating many of the necessary code generation and testing stages. RapidiTTy Builder provides extensive library support for both everyday tasks (switch and LCD interfaces, ADCs, PWM, UARTs, etc), and for the creation of Ethernet- and CAN-based designs. The package includes two TT operating systems for single-processor designs (sEOS, TTCos), plus a third OS (SCTTCos) which supports multi-processor designs.

RapidiTTy Builder will be released in February 2008 at a cost of £495 + VAT per seat: a limited number of initial orders are now being taken under an “early bird” registration programme.

Sources: http://www.tte-systems.com 

http://wwwembed-sys-demo-lab.co.uk
With support from the Leverhulme Trust, ESL staff are currently involved in the creation of an adaptive cruise-control testbed.

This is an open-source testbed, and full details of the design and implementation are being released through this WWW site, by means of a series of technical reports. Together these reports describe a complete hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation that reproduces the behaviour of a passenger car travelling down a motorway. In the simulation, the speed and position of the car are determined by an adaptive cruise control system implemented using one or more embedded microcontrollers.

The test bed is intended to be used to assess and compare different software architectures for use in distributed embedded systems, particularly those for which high reliability is a key design consideration.