Practical is put into practice — Virtutech, Inc., provider of virtualized system development (VSD) solutions for electronic systems, today announced that its Simics® virtual platform has been selected by Honeywell as a simulation platform for NASA’s Orion crew exploration vehicle, America’s spacecraft for a new generation of explorers. Simics will help to improve the product life cycle of Orion by providing a collaboration capability for software development at least 12 months before actual hardware availability.

Orion will carry crew members to the International Space Station, to the moon and later to Mars. It will be a key element in extending a sustained human presence beyond low-Earth orbit to advance commerce, science and national leadership.

The Simics VSD platform is valuable to space and aerospace programs because software and system developers typically have limited access to hardware platforms for which they are developing and testing software. These platforms are usually expensive, in limited supply, or unavailable because the vehicle has previously been launched. Using virtualized system development enables engineers to use flexible virtual hardware that is capable of evolving as the physical hardware evolves: from a simple commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) reference board used in the early design of the program, to different iterations or configurations of the production hardware, all the way to launched legacy hardware, which may degrade over time due to the harsh environment of space.

“The adoption of Virtutech Simics as the core virtual development platform for Orion is validation of Simics as a market leading simulation platform for the space and aerospace industry as well as for the Power Architecture market,” said Michel Genard, vice president of marketing, Virtutech, Inc. “We anticipate that the Orion Project will achieve an entirely new level of efficiency and a much faster development timeline due to the full system development capabilities of the Simics platform.” Orion orbits the moon with disc-shaped solar arrays tracking the sun to generate electricity. Image Credit: Lockheed Martin Corp.

Simics is a high performance full-system simulator that enables engineers to develop, debug, test and run their entire software application stack on a virtual representation of their target hardware, called a virtual platform. The overall engineering development efforts are reduced through advanced capabilities normally not available with physical hardware: non-invasive debugging and tracing, saving and later resuming execution, full deterministic behavior, built-in networking capabilities, forward and reverse execution, ability to examine, control and break on any internal device and to inject faults, and the ability to save system state and later replay it. Simics runs unmodified production-quality binaries and can be used with third party software development tools.

Phoenix-based Honeywell supports Lockheed Martin’s efforts in developing the Orion crew exploration vehicle by providing hardware and software for Command and Data Handling systems, displays, controls, and navigation. Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] is the prime contractor to NASA for Orion.