Absint

AbsInt provides advanced development tools for embedded systems, and tools for validation, verification and certification of safety-critical software.

Background and mission

The embedded market of today is characterized by constantly rising software complexity and increasingly shorter time-to-market. The share of safety-critical applications is rising.

AbsInt’s tools are designed to

• Enhance software safety
  • Speed up time-to-market
  • Lower testing and validation costs
  • Improve software efficiency to reduce system costs for embedded, real-time, safety-critical applications

Our tools are based on a generic and generative framework which allows an extremely quick, sound and flexible response to customer needs. This has been more than proven in a series of successful projects and by outstanding customer satisfaction.

Analysis and verification tools

Software testing accounts for a major part of development costs. This is especially true for real-time systems, where correctness not only depends on logical correctness, but also on the timeliness of the results. Timing properties are hard to establish; measuring and time-stopping methods are error-prone and time-consuming.

Static program analyses provide means to reduce testing and validation costs. The underlying theory of abstract interpretation enables the systematic derivation of provably correct analyses. The analyses are performed at compile-time and provide results which hold for any program execution and any possible input scenario.

• Timing validation for real-time software

Our award-winning aiT WCET Analyzer is the first software tool for verifying that safety-critical applications always react fast enough. Since 2002, aiT is used by Airbus France for validating the timing behavior of critical avionics software.

• Static verification of safety properties

Our StackAnalyzer automatically computes the worst-case stack usage of the tasks in embedded applications. This not only reduces development effort, but also helps to prevent runtime errors due to stack overflow.

Optimization tools

Optimizing compiler technology allows to fine-tune application programs for the underlying hardware. This enhances software efficiency and contributes to reducing system costs.

Our aiPop code compaction suite automatically reduces the code size of embedded applications — without changing their functionality. Since 2000, aiPop-compacted software runs in millions of mobile phones and automobiles worldwide.