Small UK Firm to Sell 'AutoSteve' to Aeronautic Giants

Computergram International, April 7, 1999

First Earth Ltd, a small Welsh company formed out of a university computer science department, is in sales negotiations with giants such as Boeing Co and NASA for circuit testing software known as AutoSteve.

The Aberystwyth-based firm told ComputerWire that Boeing had expressed a firm interest in purchasing the software for safety-testing its airplane electricals, although it doesn't expect the deal to be closed in the near term. However, a deal is expected with an as-yet-unnamed company of "comparable size" in the coming months.

AutoSteve is Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) software, which integrates with a computer-aided design (CAD) package to run testing algorithms on circuit designs. The system then reports any possible circuit failures or faults in English, as opposed to numbers. As the software is dependent on the CAD package, First Earth is currently adapting it to work with Mentor Graphics Corp's offerings, as well as TransCable's ECAD.

First Earth was spun out of the University of Wales after AutoSteve had been developed for commercial use in conjunction with automobile manufacturers Ford and Jaguar. Ford has recently rolled out AutoSteve globally.