New i-Logix Statemate MAGNUM fills major void in systems design automation; "Visual collaboration" capability uses common dynamic data source to unify designers, implementation teams and customers for the first time

Business Wire, June 24, 1996

ANDOVER, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 24, 1996--i-Logix Inc. today raised the bar in systems design automation (SDA) with the introduction of the new Statemate MAGNUM.

Using an innovative software capability called "visual collaboration," coupled with behavioral design and analysis tools, Statemate MAGNUM enables companies to design and bring to market complex systems far more quickly and at a lower cost.

Statemate MAGNUM--a graphical simulation and software synthesis tool for the rapid development of complex embedded systems--is targeted for the design of complex systems such as avionics, fuel management and anti-lock braking systems. Statemate MAGNUM is significant because it promotes collaboration among systems designers, developers and customers for the first time.

Using a common visual design process called visual collaboration, Statemate MAGNUM shortens design cycles and ensures a high-quality product is produced the first time. This capability is particularly critical with complex systems which have multiple interacting parts that must work tightly together to achieve an end goal.

"Statemate MAGNUM fills a critical void in the systems design process by enabling engineers to design complex systems quickly and efficiently. The software is based on over 80-person years of development effort and 12 years of experience with Statechart technology, mathematical models, design simulation and code generation. It represents a powerful new generation of systems design automation software because it unifies the designer, implementation team and customer to produce the best possible product the first time," said Gene Robinson, president and CEO of i-Logix.

Visual collaboration explained

Statemate MAGNUM's visual collaboration capability is based on a new design animation process that creates high-level visualizations of complex system designs. This capability provides all project members and the customer with a clear understanding of the system's dynamic behavior as the product is being designed, enabling them to make changes before progressing further into the design process. This approach dramatically shortens the design cycle and ensures a high-quality product is produced the first time.

Visual collaboration is particularly important in designing complex systems, such as telephone switching systems, medical instrumentation systems and automotive instrument panels, for example, because they have multiple interacting components that must be explicitly specified and work crisply together. Using Statemate MAGNUM's graphical language, engineers can clearly and intuitively convey a system's logic to their customers, showing them how a system is expected to behave, and testing that it functions correctly as they design it.

"Statemate MAGNUM is a definitive product in Electronic System Level design," said Gary Smith, principal analyst for EDA at Dataquest. "i-Logix was the first company to give equal weight to both hardware and software design requirements. Statemate MAGNUM not only allows the engineer to create a powerful, high-level virtual prototype, it also allows for the migration of the virtual prototype down to the register-transfer level for actual hardware design and software code generation, and has the potential for hardware/software co-specification."

SDA analogous to EDA market in 80's

Today's high-level systems design automation is analogous to the electronic design automation (EDA) market 15 years ago, where engineers drew schematics by hand and extracted net lists manually. Because initial EDA designs were not reusable in electronic form, schematics had to be updated at the end of the design phase, if at all, and few behavioral tools were available to validate the design. Today, there are a myriad of automation tools available because as designs have become more complex, manual design became an impossible approach.

SDA is now at this same threshold. While military and aerospace companies have actively used SDA tools because of the mission-critical nature of their environment, mainstream industries, such as automotive and medical, have typically relied on thousands of pages of written specifications. These cumbersome, manual, sequential specifications can't be verified until the system is already developed.

During the past several years, revelations about the real cost of post-production support, product recalls and legal liabilities have forced many companies to seek automated methods of validating design viability and performance early in the design cycle. This is the critical void filled by Statemate MAGNUM.

"While there have been products that help engineers automate pieces of the design process, only Statemate MAGNUM provides the first comprehensive systems design automation solution for the critical first phase of system design development of the system specification," said Robinson.

Trailblazing and Sharpshooting

As the next generation of i-Logix' Statemate family, Statemate MAGNUM combines an advanced architecture and new Motif-based graphical user interface (GUI) with new simulation and code generation engines. Trailblazer, the new simulator, enables engineers to interactively debug models of complex systems at any stage of the design cycle.