Customers & Markets
With over 350 commercial licensees and many times more open source users worldwide, our modern real-time embedded frameworks are the most popular such offering on the market. Our software powers countless electronic products ranging from implantable medical devices to complex weapon systems.
Our Commercial Licensees
Our modern embedded software has been commercially licensed worldwide by hundreds of companies large and small.
Some of our Commercial Licensees
What software engineers say about our products...
Honeywell, Minnesota
Nipro Diabetes Systems
General Dynamics C4 Systems
EIM Controls, Inc.
Markets We Serve
Our QP™ real-time embedded frameworks, the QM™ modeling tool and our unique QTools™ collection address high-reliability applications across a wide variety of markets, such as medical, consumer, IoT, defense, robotics, industrial, communication, transportation, semiconductor IP, and many others. In each of these application areas, our elegant software and modern design philosophy have distinct advantages.
Consumer Electronics
The extremely high volumes typical of electronic consumer products combined with intense price competition makes low per-unit cost essential to the success in this market. But today’s consumer electronic products outgrow the venerable “main+ISR” software structure due to rapidly growing complexity associated with rich user interfaces, ubiquitous connectivity, and low-power requirements. The lightweight, event driven QP frameworks are ideal for combining hard real-time functions with stateful user interfaces and communication stacks, for only a fraction of the RAM footprint and cost of a conventional RTOS.
Medical Devices
Software that controls medical devices must go through stringent certification process to ensure maximum safety and reliability. To manage the process, the medical device industry increasingly turns to formal methods, such as software modeling as the means to maintain and objectively prove traceability from requirements specification, through system design, to final implementation. The QM™ modeling and code generation tool, based on the UML concepts of hierarchical state machines (UML statecharts) and active objects, directly supports the modern modeling approach. Additionally, the QP/Spy software tracing instrumentation embedded in the QP frameworks provides the ready-to-use software tracing infrastructure for unit testing, verification and validation.
Defense & Aerospace
With human lives at stake the military and aerospace systems are under similar strict certification requirements as the medical devices and many benefits of the QP frameworks and the QM modeling tool for medical devices apply equally to the defense and aerospace applications. The certifiability of Q™ frameworks is enhanced by their open source character, excellent and detailed documentation, strict adherence to coding standards as well as compliance with MISRA safety standards and support for static analysis tools such as PC-lint.
Industrial & Transportation
In the industrial control, process automation, and transportation systems markets interoperability is key. Due to the “thin-wire” communication style inherent in the event-driven paradigm, the QP reactive framework are easy to distribute among many interconnected nodes. The QP family provides the commonality of architecture and the naturally resulting interoperability from the simple devices all the way to complex distributed systems running multiple instances of our QP frameworks on variety of platforms, including Linux (POSIX) and Windows (Win32). Specifically for transportation systems, all versions of the QP frameworks comply with the Motor Industry Software Reliability Association (MISRA) standards.
Communication & Internet of Things
In the last decade, connectivity and especially wireless connectivity in embedded devices has become ubiquitous. Designers of ultra low-power systems, such as wireless sensor networks (the “Things” in IoT), love the event-driven QP frameworks for their extremely small footprint, especially in RAM, and inherently low-power characteristics, where the CPU is used only for processing events and otherwise can be put into a low-power sleep mode.
Semiconductor IP
Semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP) cores are at the heart of today’s most innovative and exciting electronics products. More and more of these highly complex System-on-Chip (SoC) devices contain one or even more processor cores that require firmware. With the RAM footprint below 1KB, the event-driven QP frameworks are ideal for such cost-sensitive, resource constrained, event-driven environments. Also, in the deeply-embedded SoC applications the firmware must be subject to the same reliability standards as the silicon itself due to the very high costs associated with every tape-out. To achieve such highest levels of reliability the firmware developers need to apply the disciplined formal design methods based on modeling, which is exactly what QP frameworks provide. Additional QP advantage here is that the underlying state machine concepts are already familiar to the designers working on the hardware-software boundary.
Other Industries
The applicability of active object (actor) frameworks goes beyond a conventional RTOS. An actor framework can do all things that an RTOS can do, but due to the inversion of control, an event-driven framework can offer benefits that no conventional RTOS can match. For example, zero-copy and publish-subscribe event delivery provided in QP. Actually, the benefits of the lightweight, efficient, and robust actor frameworks extend even beyond embedded systems, because most computer systems today are event-driven. The ability of running on top of “big” operating systems such as Linux or Windows opens quite new possibilities for applying QP in traditionally IT-type applications.
