embedded Award 2014 winners

QNX, ARM and solvertec have received the embedded Award 2014 in the Software, Hardware and Tools categories, respectively.

To reduce distracting engine noise, automotive manufacturers use active noise compensation technologies that play back antiphase sound over the speaker system. The engineers at QNX acoustics have optimised this process. With the QNX acoustics for active noise control they have developed a software-based solution that drives the speakers via the existing processors in the infotainment system. This results in lower costs and greater scope in terms of design. The solution offers higher efficiency coupled with shorter development time for all vehicle configurations.

ARM’s (the winner in the Hardware category) ARMv8 is based on the architecture with the innovative ‘bare metal’ hypervisor, which allows simultaneous working on different operating systems, applications or real-time tasks on one processor. The individual software components are strictly separated in this process. ARM’s new architecture opens up new possibilities for many embedded system engineers working on the development of safety-critical systems in the automotive and industrial fields. The new architecture not only cuts costs and development times, but it is suitable for model-based automatic code generation, which enables the software quality of the products to be improved.

solvertec GmbH, a start-up at Bremen University, convinced the jury in the Tools category. The company has developed the world’s first scalable Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Tool, which automates the debugging of complex register transfer level designs. Error detection in HDL designs is still a difficult task that takes up more than 35% of development time. This is where solvertec’s solution comes in. Debug!t carries out a fully automatic analysis of the HDL code, generates potential bug locations and indicates only the possible HDL statements for debugging. This reduces the debugging time from (previously) days to a few minutes, as shown on prototype example solutions. The development of Debug!t was partly funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy via its start-up program ‘EXIST Transfer of Research’.