Cockpit display

Mistral Solutions as extended its product offerings with the latest from Esterel Technologies - the SCADE ARINC 661 Solutions for Interactive Cockpit Display Development.

This commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) tool provides companies with a means to define processes that will bring more independence and great control when defining Cockpit Display Systems. The SCADE ARINC 661 Solutions help airframers, CDS developers and UA developers to efficiently create and certify, up to DO-178B Level A, ARINC 661-compliant Cockpit Display Systems and User Applications. The SCADE ARINC 661 Solutions are built on top of the SCADE Suite and SCADE Display (featured in Mistral’s April 2010 PR), which are both used for developing UAs and CDS logic and graphics.

The SCADE ARINC 661 Solutions consist of three products:

• The SCADE ARINC 661 Widget Designer: Enables CDS suppliers to build their ARINC 661 widgets, and associated look and feel, as SCADE Suite and SCADE Display models. It includes a default Widget Library, containing all ARINC 661 standard-based widgets, with the flexibility to edit, modify and re-generate them at anytime.

• The SCADE ARINC 661 UA Designer Environment, including:

o   SCADE ARINC 661 UA Pages Creator: Enables UA developers to create ARINC 661 UA pages by rapidly assembling ARINC 661 Widgets

o   SCADE ARINC 661 UA/Server Communication module: Enables developers to co-simulate their UAs and the created ARINC 661 pages

o   SCADE ARINC 661 Server (PC implementation)

• The SCADE ARINC 661 UA Definition File Generator: Allows for generation of ARINC 661 standard XML and binary Definition Files from the description of ARINC 661 pages, with its DO-178B level A Certification Kit

Additionally, the SCADE ARINC 661 Server and associated source code license enables users to port their server implementation onto the embedded target.

The SCADE ARINC 661 Solutions also benefit from the numerous tool-chain integration modules already available for SCADE Suite and SCADE Display.

New CEO for Indian leading technology design and systems engineering company

Mistral Solutions has announced the appointment of Sanjay Virnave as its Chief Executive Officer.

The 13-year old company has over the years established itself as a respected player in product engineering services, defense electronics and homeland security domain, with operations in India and USA.

Sanjay Virnave

Sanjay is an industry veteran with an illustrious career in Sales and Marketing spanning 25 years. He has worked with several leading organizations like IDM, PCL, NIIT, Acer and Tulip Telecom, during this period, driving revenues with his strategic leadership skills. Sanjay has vast expertise in handling large accounts and Government. His last assignment was as President of Sales at Tulip Telecom Limited.

Apart from a remarkable industry career, Sanjay also serves as a guest lecturer at several premier management institutes.

“Sanjay is a great addition to the Mistral management team. His vast experience and leadership skills will be pivotal in leading Mistral’s team as we step the pedal on our ambitious growth plans in the coming years”, said Anees Ahmed - Chairman, Mistral Solutions.

While Sanjay works with the team in strengthening Mistral’s presence in its existing verticals of Product Engineering Services, Defense Solutions and Homeland Security, the founders, Anees Ahmed and Rajeev Ramachandra will continue in full-time executive management role and focus on company strategy, new business initiatives and growth plans.

“Mistral has made a mark for itself globally in the area of cutting-edge technology since its humble beginnings over a decade ago. Mistral provides me the opportunity to draw on my past experience, and work with some of the best minds in the industry. It will be my endeavor to continue offering our customer’s world class products and services across our focus domains, and being a part of the organization’s journey to the next level of excellence.” said Sanjay.

Interconnect backbone of extremely high-performance mission computing environments

Mistral Solutions has announced the availability of Curtiss Wright’s new OpenVPX™/VITA-65 compliant VPX6-6902 Serial RapidIO® (SRIO) switch card.

The VPX6-6902 SRIO switch is a rugged 6U VPX board, available in both air and conduction-cooled versions and combines Ethernet and SRIO switching in a single slot for management, control and dataplane switching in high performance embedded military systems. Supporting both Gen-1 SRIO (1.25, 2.5, 3.125 Gbaud) and Gen-2 SRIO (5.0, 6.25 Gbaud), the VPX6-6902 enables systems integrators to quickly and easily architect small to large high-performance systems that adhere to the VITA-65 OpenVPX™ systems specification.

The VPX6-6902 is designed to form the interconnect backbone of extremely high-performance mission computing environments, and simplifies systems design with features designed for redundant and fail-safe architectures. The VPX6-6902 is available in a variety of system configurations, and supports a number of standard OpenVPX™ profiles.

UART and CAN modules to support the extended system peripheral needs of developers

Furthering its initiatives on Texas Instruments (TI) platforms, Mistral has announced daughter cards for TI evaluation modules (EVMs) based on TI’s Sitara™ AM1x microprocessors (MPUs) and OMAP-L1x application processors for embedded industrial, medical and consumer designs.

These TI platforms address customer concerns of cost, connectivity, power efficiency and ease of development of applications by providing a platform with robust operating systems support, rich user interfaces and high processing performance. These processors feature a unique rich peripheral sub-system known as the Programmable Real-time Unit (PRU). The PRU sub-system consists of dual 32-bit RISC processors, specifically designed for manipulation of packed memory mapped data structures and for implementing system features that have tight real-time constraints. It offers flexible and configurable input/output controls, enabling developers to extend peripheral capabilities and add custom interfaces to their designs.

Mistral offers two plug-in daughter cards helping developers leverage the benefits of the PRU features on the AM1x and OMAP-L1x processors:

• The UART daughter card has interfaces for soft UART, hard UART and soft DIR.
• The CAN daughter card provides soft CAN and hard CAN bus interfaces.

Mistral has worked extensively on TI’s leading technology platforms, providing professional services in the areas of custom board design, reference designs, driver development, board support packages and software integration across various technology domains.

“Mistral has been in the forefront of providing a host of well-received offerings on TI platforms,” said Samyeer Metrani, Vice President, Services (USA), Mistral. “Our two daughter cards for TI’s AM1x and OMAP-L1x lines of processors allow developers to leverage the PRU functionality, thereby helping customers build solutions targeted at the industrial and automotive markets. Mistral will also offer development and customization services to customers planning to build next-generation devices around the Sitara and OMAP platforms.”

“TI is committed to offering resources to help make development easier for our customers’ hardware and software engineers,” said Seán Murphy, Marketing Manager, Sitara, TI. “By working with Mistral to develop the daughter cards and software, customers can enjoy benefits including low customer development costs and improved connectivity. The daughter cards enable customers to eliminate the development cycle from the design process by providing the source code for the PRU, enabling the cards to be easily snapped onto the EVMs for extra capabilities, ultimately allowing for a shortened time to market from faster proto-typing.”

High resolution dual-channel ADC FMC Card

Designed for use in demanding DSP applications like SIGNIT, ECM and Radar Applications

Mistral Solutions has announced the availability of the highest resolution FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC/VITA 57) module from Curtiss Wright, the new ADC511, a 400MS/s 14-bit, dual channel ADC card

The ADC511 uses two Texas Instruments ADS5474 analog to digital converters. Each device supports a sampling rate up to 400MSPS with 14-bit resolution. Available in both air-cooled and conduction-cooled rugged versions, the ADC511 is aimed at DSP applications such as Signal Intelligence (SIGINT), Electronic Counter Measures (ECM), and Radar.

The ADC511 speeds and simplifies the integration of FPGAs into embedded system design by providing high bandwidth I/O direct to the host card´s FPGAs. It eliminates data bottlenecks to increase DSP subsystem performance by routing high-speed ADC I/O directly to the host board’s FPGAs via the FMC connector.

The ADC511 can be fitted to FMC hosts like Curtiss-Wright’s FPE320, FPE650 and HPE720. The combination of the ADC511 with a suitable host provides developers with a high quality analog I/O and processing solution in a single VPX/VPX-REDI slot.

Partnership to cover India

Mistral and Esterel Technologies Announce Partnership to Expand SCADE® Deployment in India

Mistral Solutions and Esterel Technologies have announced a partnership to expand deployment of SCADE Suite® and SCADE Display® to critical embedded control application developers and critical embedded display application developers, respectively.

Mistral will offer this family of products in the Indian market to address mission and safety-critical software development needs in aerospace and defense, rail transportation, nuclear instrumentation and control, industrial, and medical applications. These environments often require qualification or certification under standards such as DO-178B up to Level A (aerospace and defense), EN 50128 SIL 3/4 (rail transportation), IEC 61508 SIL 3 (industrial), and IEC 60880 (nuclear instrumentation and control).

• SCADE Suite®, a formal model-based development environment for critical embedded applications provides formal state machine and data flow semantics for design entry as well as model-based verification. SCADE Suite has been qualified under DO-178B Level A and certified under EN 50128 to SIL 3/4 for Rail Applications and SIL 3 under IEC 61508 for Industrial Applications.
  
  
• SCADE Display®, an embedded graphics development environment dedicated to safety-critical display systems, intrinsically supports OpenGL-SC, the safety-critical variant of Open GL. SCADE Display KCG™ has been qualified under DO-178B, up to Level A for the Military and Aerospace industries.

“Mistral is happy to be partnering with Esterel Technologies in addressing the needs of developers in the critical embedded software applications space. The alliance adds to our embedded product suite, and gives our customers a wider array of cutting-edge technology solutions that adhere to tough quality standards”, said Mujahid Alam, Vice President – Sales.

“Mistral’s core values, products, and experience align very well with Esterel Technologies and the SCADE family product offering. In addition, Mistral’s firm understanding of the Indian critical embedded software industry, the needs of its clients, and strong technical pedigree will be instrumental in the deploying SCADE successfully throughout the market”, commented Eric Bantegnie, President and CEO of Esterel Technologies.