The Reviews Are In: Scade One Is a Game-changer

The newest member of the Ansys SCADE family, Ansys Scade One, makes it faster, easier, and more intuitive than ever to generate embedded software code for critical applications.

In a previous blog post, we announced the upcoming availabilty of Ansys Scade One, the newest offering in the Ansys SCADE software suite. This exciting new solution is now available as part of our most recent software release, Ansys 2024 R1.

SCADE solutions have helped hundreds of Ansys customers ensure that their mission-critical products — including planes, trains, cars, and power plants — work reliably in everyday operating conditions. It provides a model-based development environment for designing and validating embedded software code that complies with functional needs, safety requirements, and regulatory standards.

Over the years, SCADE has continuously evolved to address the changing needs of the world’s product development teams, including their need to develop software-defined systems, add automonous functionality, leverage cloud and high-performance computing (HPC), and meet stricter safety regulations.

Scade One is purpose-built to meet the growing demands of modern engineers. It accommodates numerically large, complex software development problems, as well as more stringent testing requirements. It integrates seamlessly with HPC resources, cloud delivery models, and advanced engineering tools.

An Innovative Solution Built with User Needs in Mind

Aubanel Monnier, safety and embedded software director at Ansys, played a leadership role in gathering real-world feedback from SCADE users and applying those insights to launch this new solution.

“The message we hear from customers is clear,” says Monnier. “Their jobs have grown increasingly complex. They want a development tool that makes the process of generating and verifying software code much faster, easier, and more intuitive, but without compromising safety or confidence. I’m proud to say Scade One achieves that vision.”

According to Monnier, Scade One continues to extend the robust mathematic and analytic performance of traditional SCADE solutions. It puts the tools, notations, and mathematical rigor used by system engineers into the hands of software engineers, building a bridge between the two disciplines and permitting closer, faster communication.

“Scade One really represents a mindset shift,” Monnier says. “It’s incredibly powerful in terms of its functional and safety analysis, but at the same time, it’s very easy to use. The customer’s high-level safety requirements are visually linked to the detailed software code in a way that’s direct, transparent, and simple to understand. This tool will not only significantly accelerate the process of generatring and validating code, but it’s also going to greatly reduce training requirements. New users and less-experienced programmers will be able to quickly get up to speed on Scade One.”

This new solution was exhaustively tested and validated by many users at Ansys, including Tim Puls, lead application engineer. Puls is a long-time SCADE user, first working as a software programmer for Ansys customer organizations before joining the team of Ansys field application engineers who work alongside customers to solve problems and improve processes.

Puls echoes Monnier’s belief that Scade One will represent a game-changer for Ansys customers who face tight product-launch deadlines — but also critical safety requirements.

“Probably the first thing users will notice when they demo Scade One is its entirely new look and feel,” says Puls. “It’s fun to use, replicating the ease of use, graphical nature, and smart services of consumer apps. And it’s going to allow our customers to get to results much, much faster, which is essential in innovation-driven industries like automotive and aerospace.”

Our Customers Spoke, and Ansys Listened

Monnier has demoed Scade One with Ansys customers, and the feedback he’s received has been incredibly positive. “There’s a lot of excitement about Ansys 2024 R1, which includes Scade One,”  he says. “When we show customers how easy the process of developing code has become, they’re very impressed. This is a truly revolutionary solution that our customers can’t wait to get their hands on.”

According to Monnier, it’s not surprising that customers are so excited because Scade One was developed specifically to answer their practical needs. He points out a number of key features that were developed specifically based on customer feedback:

• A more intuitive, visual coding experience. While Scade One delivers the same robust, industry-leading modeling performance users have come to expect from SCADE, today that functionality is delivered via an engaging user interface (UI) that offers numerous interactive services and features. This consumer-like UI is built from scratch on a fresh, modern foundation. Features like a “help overlay” provide immediate, expert guidance throughout the model-building process.
• On-the-fly checks for errors. Historically, programmers have had to create entire architectures or large blocks of code, then backtrack to check them for errors. But Scade One eliminates significant time and effort with on-the-fly checks that detect inconsistencies and errors in real time as the model is created and edited. Automated “quick fixes” are also available to correct errors or perform model-wide refactoring — for example, renaming a declaration and all its uses. “Because feedback happens in real time, Scade One supports a software design process that’s natural and iterative,” says Puls.
• Improved capacity and quality of model expression. The underlying language of Scade One, called Swan, was purpose-built by Ansys to express the functionality of mission-critical software as accurately as possible. Swan produces models that are readable and easily understood while applying rigorous logic and rules — providing a safe and trusted development framework. Swan includes new modeling and programming features that allow users to target more complex applications and systems. Swan is the underlying foundation that enables Scade One to simplify massively large problems, while flagging important elements and bringing them to the user’s attention.
• Enhanced support for communication. It’s traditionally been challenging for programmers to discuss complex issues like software functionality or adherence to safety requirements with other stakeholders, such as system engineers and compliance officers. Scade One provides an easily accessible, cross-functional communications tool. “With Scade One’s graphical models, it’s simple and straightforward to show a specific software task, then also show exactly what part of the model triggers that task,” says Monnier. “It makes complex logic easy for anyone to visualize.”

Prepare Now for Improved Speed and Efficiency

Both Monnier and Puls stress that early adopters of Scade One will experience meaningful improvements in speed and efficiency that will translate into faster code generation and validation — driving a competitive advantage.

They also stress the importance of gaining continued feedback from Scade One users. “Customer insights were absolutely critical in bringing this revolutionary solution to market, and those insights will be just as important in developing future versions of Scade One,” says Monnier. “We encourage our customers to give Scade One a try and tell us about the real-world benefits it creates for their product development efforts.”

Ready to become an early adopter of Scade One? Register for our on-demand webinar, “Introducing Ansys Scade One,” or request a demo today to see this innovative solution in action.