GNAT Pro Available for 8-bit AVR Microcontroller

SAN JOSE, Calif. and PARIS, March 31, 2009 - Embedded Systems Conference - AdaCore, provider of the highest quality Ada tools and support, today announced availability of its GNAT Pro Ada development environment for the Atmel® AVR® 8-bit microcontroller. This brings the high-level language benefits of Ada to the embedded systems community who have requirements for low-power and small-memory devices, easing the job of developing safety-critical and high-Security deeply embedded applications.

The first user of GNAT Pro for AVR will be the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE). AWE is a long-standing Ada user, and GNAT Pro’s support for the AVR processor will enable AWE to extend its Ada usage to new projects.

GNAT Pro for AVR benefits from the features and functionalities of GNAT Pro’s existing High Integrity Edition. It comes with a Zero Footprint run-time library that is particularly well adapted to meet the small memory constraints of the AVR microcontroller. GNAT Pro for AVR demonstrates the suitability of the Ada programming language for safety-critical development for architectures ranging from 8-bit to 32-bit and 64-bit processors.

“The industry has long been waiting for an Ada solution on 8-bit microcontrollers. GNAT Pro for AVR demonstrates AdaCore’s capability to answer the needs of customers who work in highly constrained environments,” said Michaël Friess, Technical Sales Manager at AdaCore. “Organizations such as AWE that are using the AVR microcontroller will find a product that takes into account the increasing interest in formal methods, providing a natural fit with SPARK and Praxis High-Integrity Systems’ correctness-by-construction approach.”

Atmel’s low-power, high-performance AVR microcontroller handles demanding 8-bit applications. With a single cycle instruction RISC CPU, innovative picoPowerTM technology, and a rich feature set, the AVR architecture ensures fast code execution combined with the lowest possible power consumption.

“Following an extensive evaluation, we decided to standardize on Ada as our development language of choice due to its early error detection and its support for our safety-critical, high-reliability requirements,” said a spokesperson for the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment. “Since many of our projects include deeply embedded systems, GNAT Pro for AVR is an ideal solution.”

About GNAT Pro

The GNAT Pro development environment, available on more platforms than any other Ada toolset, combines industry-leading technology with an expert support infrastructure and provides a natural solution for organizations that need to create reliable, efficient, and maintainable code. GNAT Pro is the first-to-market implementation of the Ada 2005 standard, allowing users to take advantage of the many enhancements in areas such as object-oriented programming, real-time support, and predefined libraries.

At the heart of GNAT Pro is a full-featured, multi-language development environment complete with libraries, bindings, and a range of supplementary tools, including automatic documentation generator, code metric tool, code standard checker, and a unit testing framework. All GNAT Pro technology is distributed with complete source code. GNAT Pro is based on the widely used GCC technology, is subjected to a rigorous quality assurance process, and is backed by rapid and expert support service.

Pricing and Availability

GNAT Pro for AVR is currently available to GNAT Pro customers. Please contact AdaCore (sales@adacore.com) for the latest information on pricing and supported configurations.

About AdaCore

Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, a state-of-the-art programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore’s flagship product is the GNAT Pro development environment, which comes with expert on-line support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has an extensive world-wide customer base; see www.adacore.com/home/company/customers/ for further information.