Without using QP, I don't believe we could have delivered on our given schedule dates with the same level of quality."
Jeff Karau, Sr. Software Engineer, General Dynamics C4 Systems
Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++, Second Edition: Event-Driven Programming for Embedded Systems (PSiCC2) is the most popular book about UML statecharts and event-driven programming for embedded systems. This ultimate resource describes all the related concepts and provides a very detailed design study of the QP™ frameworks.
companion page to PSiCC2
...After trying out a couple of CASE tools we came to the conclusion that expensive round-trip-engineering UML tools were cumbersome and did not fit our way of working. However, the innovative QP way to map UML state machines to C/C++ code was exactly what we were looking for..."
Henrik Bohre, Embedded Systems Consultant, GotCom AB, Göteborg, Sweden
I'm speaking from first-hand experience when I say this is really good stuff. I just hope others will recognize that and we can get past the old main+ISR vs. RTOS dilemma for a large variety of applications."
Michael Barr, President Netrino and former editor-in-chief of the ESP magazine
Practical Statecharts in C/C++ has been an indispensible reference for my embedded systems work. The clear and succinct conceptual and software framework, along with the immediately usable code enabled us to get a working prototype of our control system in a few weeks."
Dr. Haitham Hindi, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
...QP has been adopted accross the company and is used in all our products on a variety of OS platforms..."
Dr. Paul Montgomery, Director of Engineering, Novariant, Fremont CA
I recently rewrote a major piece of code to utilise the QP framework and it has worked wonders. My previous code used a more traditional state machine and had quickly evolved into spaghetti code. The hierarchical state machine approach made the new code smaller, more robust, and much easier to maintain and extend."
Bob Bradley, Apple Computer, Inc., from Amazon.com review
Quantum Leaps software has revolutionized not just the way we write our software, but the way we approach our design. It is intuitive, easy to implement and comes in an incredibly small package. If you're in the 8-bit world, you need this software!"
Chad Koster, Software Engineer, Honeywell
Simply put, designing sofware using the QP framework lets you code the way you think..."
Rich Wooley, Sofware Engineer, Nipro Diabetes Systems, Florida
About Quantum Leaps®
Quantum Leaps®, LLC provides lightweight application frameworks for modeling and coding real-time embedded systems. Our QP™ family of open source, state machine frameworks enable software developers to directly implement hierarchical state machines (UML statecharts) and concurrent, event-driven applications in highly maintainable C or C++ without big design automation tools.
The main components of our technology have been described in the book Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++, Second Edition (Newnes 2008), and have been subsequently ported to several microprocessors and real-time operating systems. Embedded systems developers worldwide are using QP™ because of its modern software architecture, strong support for state machines, safe programming model, small memory footprint, comprehensive documentation, and greatly reduced total cost of application development and maintenance. Our software products are used by some of the largest companies in the world in consumer, medical, industrial, wireless, networking, research, automotive, defense, robotics, and other applications worldwide.
Quantum Leaps®, LLC is a privately held Limited Liability Company incorporated in the state of North Carolina. We are located in Chapel Hill — just minues to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to the Research Triangle Park. Please contact us through our Contact page.
Mission
Our mission is to bring quantum leaps of innovation to embedded systems programming. We are dedicated to providing simple, practical software solutions that enable widespread adoption of modern hierarchical state machines, active object computing, and framework-based application development directly at the level of C or C++ without big tools. Our goal is to dramatically improve sofware quality and shorten the development cycles by making modern state machines, active object computing, UML, object-oriented programming, design by contract, and other such profound software concepts more accessible to the embedded systems community.
Business Model
Quantum Leaps®, LLC is a second-generation open source company that has established sustainable business based on dual-licensing of open source software. Second-generation open source companies, such as MySQL, Sleepycat, or Trolltech, make the majority of their revenue from selling software licenses. Historically, most first-generation open source companies have built their business model on a free product and paid support, while Quantum Leaps®charges for the product and offers free 1-year technical support with every commercial license. As a consequence, we are highly motivated to keep our software free of bugs, easy to use, and to supply good documentation with many examples to minimize our support load and expenses. This is in contrast to many first-generation open-source companies (e.g., Linux vendors), where such strategy would actually lower their revenue and profit from support contracts.
The disruptive Professional Open Source model that we practice combines the best of the open source and proprietary software worlds to make open source a safe choice for the embedded systems vendors. This includes the unrestricted software downloads, transparent development and active community inherent in open source as well as professional documentation and technical support expected of a traditional software vendor. In contrast to most open source offerings, second-generation companies entirely own all the Intellectual Property in their software. Therefore we can offer closed-source licensing and the accountability for the licensed Intellectual Property to all customers interested in retaining the proprietary character of their software.
Management
Dr. Miro Samek, President
Dr. Miro Samek is the author of the book Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++, Second Edition: Event-Driven Programming for Embedded Systems (Newnes, 2008), has published over 20 technical articles including a column for C/C++ Users Journal, is a regular speaker at the Embedded Systems Conferences since 2003, and serves on the editorial review board of the Embedded Systems Design magazine. His extensive industry experience ranges from safety-critical software development at GE Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare) through hard real-time embedded system design at two Silicon Valley companies specializing in GPS technologies. Dr. Samek earned his Ph.D. in nuclear physics at GSI (Darmstadt, Germany).
