Richland Technologies LLC is a leading AS9100C-certified company providing full-lifecycle hardware and software engineering, safety-critical and high-integrity product development and certification services worldwide to the civil and military avionics industry.
Headquartered in Lawrenceville, Georgia, Richland Technologies specialise in in-flight, cockpit display and advanced vision system development with services including safety engineering as well as design, implementation, verification and validation to meet DO-178C (software) and DO-254 (hardware) standards.
Some of the world’s most reputable aviation companies rely on Richland Technologies’ high-quality, standards compliant, and cost-competitive development services, — so when the company was building its design infrastructure, they spent time comparing software verification tool suites to find the best solution.
Richland Technologies is currently using the LDRA tool suite for static analysis, unit-testing, low-level verification and structural coverage analysis of the embedded software for advanced vision systems and inertial measurement units used in standby instrument systems.
Sales and Marketing Executive Robert Atkinson outlined why Richland Technologies undertook this evaluation process, “Many of our engineers had excellent previous experience with the LDRA tool suite, however, we wanted to make sure it could continue to provide the best results as our design cycles got shorter and designs became more complex. The LDRA tool suite came out on top in our evaluation of low-level verification tools for target computer systems, and we have been using it successfully for almost 3 years now. We are currently looking at implementing even more of the modules in the LDRA tool suite as our business grows.”
Once the engineers at Richland Technologies selected the LDRA tool suite, they needed to come up to speed quickly to begin verifying designs on extremely tight schedules. They relied on the LDRA support team to help them learn the tools and integrate them with the target embedded systems.
Software development, requirements traceability and verification are monumental tasks for avionics applications. Thousands of lines of code must be written, checked and rechecked. For Richland Technologies, integrating the LDRA tool suite into their workflows automated a great deal of the verification process and dramatically reduced the verification cycle and time to certification.
Richland Technologies is known for its in-depth understanding of the strict requirements-driven processes mandated by the DO-254 and DO-178 standards for the development of commercial airborne electronic systems. According to the company’s engineers, the LDRA tool suite and documentation are extremely well matched to safety-critical design flows and in-house methodologies that help achieve standards certification in much shorter timeframes. Particularly valuable features of LDRA include:
- Well organised web page-based output highlighting code coverage and static analysis results achieved during low level verification
- Rapid regression analysis
- Structural coverage results
- Robust static analysis capability
- Extensive unit tests
- Easy integration into the DO-178C design flow
Choosing verification tools that are also part of their customers’ design flows further enhances Richland Technologies’ collaborative approach to customer engagement.