ELDORADO Selects AdaCore’s QGen for Critical Medical Applications

ELDORADO develops products for the medical industry, which, like most sectors of the globalized economy, is under great pressure to be innovative, competitive and profitable. Based on the underlying life science, medical device development uses finite and hybrid automata to define the behavior of systems that interact with living organisms. This is an effective engineering solution, but by no means trivial when human lives are at stake. To ensure that the device design is correct, mathematical models and simulations are used for analysis and validation.

“Our model-based QGen toolsuite is an ideal solution for developing and verifying safety-critical control systems,” said J.C. Bernedo, QGen Business Lead at AdaCore. “Engineers can express their designs in a high-level application-oriented notation and have confidence that the safety properties of the models are preserved in the generated source code. QGen is an excellent fit for organizations fielding medical device software, and we are pleased that ELDORADO has recognized its benefits and chosen AdaCore as a technology provider for their medical R&D projects.”

“When Eldorado first decided to develop medical equipment and devices, we were fully aware of the inherent risks and liabilities of this segment,” said Guilherme Fonseca, R&D Manager of ELDORADO. “We knew it was essential to choose a technology partner capable of providing software development tools and technologies for critical systems with high reliability requirements. AdaCore’s expertise in this area was undeniable. They were fully committed to building a long-term partnership, and they offered us a support model that fits our needs.”

QGen — AdaCore’s model-based engineering tool which generates SPARK or MISRA C code from a safe subset of Simulink^® and Stateflow^® models — has allowed the ELDORADO team to focus on understanding design issues and simulating potential solutions. By using the know-how already acquired in MATLAB^® and Simulink^® software, and integrating the code generated by QGen in a robust and verifiable way, ELDORADO engineers can specify the system behavior at a high level of abstraction while achieving an optimized solution at the firmware level.

QGen has brought ELDORADO a number of tangible benefits, including:

• Increased cohesion in engineering activities. By using QGen, engineering teams can address challenges from a systemic perspective, exploring the problem and solution domains, identifying the best solution, and then using QGen to generate correct code. This has brought higher productivity and satisfaction for the engineers involved in product design and implementation.

• More transparent technical activity. Management is now more aware of the effort and risks related to understanding a design problem, which have been decoupled from the effort and risks associated with producing correct code.

• Increased productivity. Now that engineers can rely on QGen for code generation, they can focus their efforts on design. As a result, clients are finding ELDORADO’s proposals more competitive and terms more attractive.

About ELDORADO

The ELDORADO Research Institute (ICT – Institute of Science and Technology) is a national civil association, certified as an OSCIP (Civil Society Organization of Public Interest) and EMBRAPII (Brazilian Company of Research and Industrial Innovation). It has nearly 20 years of commitment to world-class research, development, service and training. Well known in Brazil, the organization always aims to achieve better results, grow, invest in innovation and strive for excellence. In addition, throughout the years ELDORADO has enjoyed a constant presence in nationally recognized rankings, which highlight the best companies to work in Brazil, and has been cited in publications such as “Guia Você S / A” and “GPTW”.

ELDORADO is located in the high-technology Campinas and Porto Alegre areas, and in business centers such as Brasilia and Manaus. With teams of highly skilled and agile engineers, analysts and researchers, it has a diversified portfolio across markets such as Telecom, Health, Agribusiness, and Energy, among others. ELDORADO conducts an average of 120 projects per year, involving over 40 clients, with know-how on emerging technologies such as IoT, Analytics, Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality. It holds several certifications, including ISO / IEC 27001, ISO 9001, ANATEL, INMETRO and ENERGY STAR. It is part of a select group of Brazilian companies with the Google Developers Agency Program certificate, is home to the only Microsoft Innovation Center (MIC) in the state of São Paulo, and is also an Apple Developer Academy.

For more information:
https://www.eldorado.org.br/?lang=en
e-mail: comunicacao@eldorado.org.br

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 and/or safety 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/.