Esterel Technologies Teams with Universities to Educate Students in Advanced Methods for Software Development and Hardware Design

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and Elancourt, France (December 4, 2002)

Esterel Technologies today announced that an additional 30 universities have joined the company's academic program since March 2002, for a total of 50 universities worldwide. The total value of Esterel Technologies donations to these universities is more than $37.5 million. Under the program, participating universities may license up to 20 seats of Esterel Technologies SCADE and up to 20 seats of Esterel Studio at no charge, provided that the software is used for educational purposes only.

The software component of electronic systems is growing exponentially, said Eric Bantégnie, president and CEO of Esterel Technologies, and the need to create formal and unambiguous specifications has become the critical element for making sure that you end up with a correct implementation. Engineering students who already know how to use best-in-class, industry-standard tools to develop software and hardware that is correct by construction are in high demand. By using SCADE and Esterel Studio in their course work, they can be productive immediately upon launching their careers in industry.

The program enables electronic engineering students to learn how to design and verify safety- and mission-critical embedded software and automatically verifiable register-transfer logic (RTL) using the same products that major worldwide companies such as Texas Instruments, ST Microelectronics, Airbus, Dassault Aviation, and Thales already use in their production design flows.

Esterel Studio is used to validate the integration of systems-on-chips, and to develop wireless telecommunications protocols and safety-critical embedded systems. SCADE has become the de facto standard for the development of correct-by-construction embedded software for civilian avionics worldwide.

New program enrollees include such prestigious institutions as the University of California Santa Cruz, University of Minnesota, and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University (United States); Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (India); Université de Bretagne Occidentale, ENSTA, and Ecole Centrale de Lille (France); University of Calgary (Canada); Linkoping University (Sweden); and Ecole d'ingénieurs de Genève (Switzerland).

SCADE and Esterel Studio are essential industrial quality tools for practicing theoretical concepts included in our course lectures, said Professor M. Zaffalon of Ecole d'ingénieurs de Genève. They help our students develop the real know-how in application modeling. As future engineers, they can access state of the art approaches to reactive systems development, one of the core activities in our laboratory.

Because of Esterel Technologies' academic program, we can access the latest innovations in design methodology, and we can participate in the evolution of reactive systems development and embedded systems cross-development. According to Professor Zaffalon, SCADE and Esterel Studio provide capabilities of prime importance in reactive systems design: both validation (by simulation) and verification (by model-checking). (See http://eig.unige.ch/lii/)

SCADE and Esterel Studio are state-of-the art tools for embedded systems design, said Professor S. Ramesh of the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India. The simulation and verification capabilities of these tools enable our students to understand and appreciate the issues very well. By participating in the academic program, we enable our students to use the tools freely and become well prepared for employment in industry.

Universities wishing to participate in the Esterel Technologies Academic Program may contact coordinator Amandine Roy at +33 1 30 68 61 74, or by email: amandine.roy@esterel-technologies.com.

For details about program enrollment, visit the Esterel Technologies Web site: Academic Program

About Esterel Technologies

Esterel Technologies provides electronic system and embedded software designers with methodologies and tools that improve their productivity and remove the barriers between system specification, implementation, and validation. The company's products automate costly and time-consuming coding and validation work through executable specification, intelligent test suite generation, and automatic code generation. Esterel Technologies is an international company with offices in France, Germany, UK, and the United States.

For more information: www.esterel-technologies.com

Contact:

Esterel Technologies

Linda Prowse Fosler

Phone : 650-641-1706

linda.prowse-fosler@esterel-technologies.com

Cayenne Communication

Michelle Clancy

Phone : 252-940-0981

michelle.clancy@cayennecom.com

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