Honeywell will use the Simics virtual platform as a simulation platform for the Orion crew exploration vehicle, NASA’s next-generation manned spacecraft. Simics will help to improve the product life cycle of Orion by providing a collaboration capability for software development at least 12 months before actual hardware availability, according to Virtutech.
Simics is a high-performance, full-system simulator that enables engineers to develop, debug, test, and run their entire software application stack on a virtual representation of their target hardware, called a virtual platform. The overall engineering development efforts are reduced through advanced capabilities normally not available with physical hardware: non-invasive debugging and tracing; saving and resumption of execution; full deterministic behavior’ built-in networking capabilities; forward and reverse execution; the ability to examine, control, and break on any internal device and to inject faults; and the ability to save system state and later replay it. The platform runs unmodified production-quality binaries and can be used with third-party software development tools.
Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor to NASA for Orion. Honeywell is supporting Lockheed Martin’s efforts in developing the Orion crew exploration vehicle by providing hardware and software for command and data handling systems, displays, controls, and navigation.
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