Embedded software simulation-concurrent engineering and beyond

Companies that develop consumer electronics, consumer telecommunication and office automation systems, face great competition. The product´s life cycle gets shorter and shorter, due to the availability of new technology and market demand. The bottleneck of shortening the development time is the software development. The most dramatic change between generations of a product, is the user interface. Rapid Plus is the tool that helps the developer shorten the design and development time of the user interface for the above family of systems. Rapid Plus introduces new tactics for the development of the user interface: the use of a quickly developed model of the system´s behavior in order to concurrently create the system specification, the embedded code and the testing procedures. The rapid virtual prototype is a full functioning simulation, created on a PC without writing code, by using a logical language. From this virtual prototype, software engineers automatically create the embedded code, while the support people and technical writers use it for creating manuals and training kits. A one-time effort by the system´s behavioral designers in creating such a model, enables other functionaries to concurrently use the model, instead of it having to go through a serial development process