NEWS
February 23, 2009
NASA Selects Virtutech Simics Virtual Platform for Orion
 
Feb 19, 2009 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) Virtutech, Inc., a provider of virtualized system development (VSD) solutions for electronic systems, announced that its Simics virtual platform has been selected by Honeywell as a simulation platform for NASA's Orion crew exploration vehicle, America's spacecraft for a new generation of explorers.

Virtutech said that Simics will help to improve the product life cycle of Orion by providing a collaboration capability for software development at least 12 months before actual hardware availability.

Orion is planned to carry crew members to the International Space Station, to the moon and eventually to Mars. It will be a key element in extending a sustained human presence beyond low-Earth orbit to advance commerce, science and national leadership.

The Simics VSD platform is valuable to space and aerospace programs because software and system developers typically have limited access to hardware platforms for which they are developing and testing software. These platforms are usually expensive, in limited supply, or unavailable because the vehicle has previously been launched. Using virtualized system development enables engineers to use flexible virtual hardware that is capable of evolving as the physical hardware evolves: from a simple commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) reference board used in the early design of the program, to different iterations or configurations of the production hardware, all the way to launched legacy hardware, which may degrade over time due to the harsh environment of space.

"The adoption of Virtutech Simics as the core virtual development platform for Orion is validation of Simics as a market leading simulation platform for the space and aerospace industry as well as for the Power Architecture market," said Michel Genard, vice president of marketing, Virtutech, Inc. "We anticipate that the Orion Project will achieve an entirely new level of efficiency and a much faster development timeline due to the full system development capabilities of the Simics platform."

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