PrismTech Announces GA Release and Immediate Evaluation Availability of its Spectra Power Tools Product Suite

PrismTech, a leading provider of productivity tools and middleware, today announced the GA v1.0 release of its Spectra(TM) Power Tools product suite for software defined radio (SDR) developers. This initial release comprises the Spectra SE Modeling Tool, the Spectra Code Generator for C++ and the Spectra Unit Test Framework, all in a single integrated suite of tools. The suite is available immediately for evaluation.

By using the Spectra Power Tools product suite, radio developers are able to model their communication systems in a highly productive, user-friendly and software radio domain-specific manner. Spectra Power Tools' domain-specific modeling provides distinct advantages over generic modeling languages such as UML, as developers can directly model in the patterns of the SDR domain. Furthermore, as they focus on defining their radio functionality the time-consuming task of developing and testing complex software infrastructure (as required by standard SDR architectures and frameworks) is totally automated by Spectra's Code Generator modules.

Thus SDR software developers and systems engineers using the Spectra Power Tools product suite benefit from reduced complexity, shorter time-to-market, increased quality and assured standards-compliance. Spectra Power Tools incorporate SDR industry standards in support of waveform and application portability. These interoperability standards help to disconnect the software and hardware lifecycle, thus enabling software reuse, providing more hardware options and extending the life of both software applications and radio platforms.

Spectra SE Modeling Tool

Based on a powerful and complete meta-model for various SDR domains the Spectra SE Modeling Tool provides SDR developers with an easy-to-use, graphical modeling environment that dramatically increases the productivity of waveform and radio platform development.

An example of one of the supported sub-domains of SDR is the Joint Tactical Radio Systems' (JTRS) Software Communications Architecture (SCA), the standard architecture for all new US and allied military and satellite communication software. The SCA capabilities of the Spectra SE Modeling Tool include complete core framework resource design with the ability to model SCA properties, tests, dependencies, implementations, ports, interfaces and more. Furthermore, complete SCA applications can be modeled with the powerful Spectra Modeling Assembly View, which can model the entire assembly including connections between components and component instance-specific configuration information.

Spectra Code Generators

A range of language-specific automatic Spectra Code Generators produce source, descriptor, and test code seamlessly from the graphical model. The functionality of the Code Generators provides SDR component developers with a complete set of infrastructure code, so that they can focus on writing the radio 'business' logic for their components. Early users of the product have experienced efficiency gains of up to 50x (several months to a single day or less) over traditional development methods.

Spectra Unit Test Framework

The Spectra Unit Test Framework (UTF) supports 'in-cycle' unit testing of the generated source code; if necessary, well in advance of radio platform availability. This 'left-shifts' defects out of run-time test and integration and into design-time rectification; a huge productivity gain.

The Spectra UTF:

-- Verifies both the generated code and any code written by the developer in support of SCA-compliance,

-- Provides test fixtures for testing individual components, multiple components, or the entire application,

-- Verifies that the 'Domain Profile' (XML) files are not only individually correct and well-formed, but that the contents are also correct for inter-working.

"Using the Spectra Power Tools allows developers of radio systems to once again focus on building the software needed to deliver radio functionality versus focusing on the complexity of the software infrastructure needed to support SDR standards," said Dominick Paniscotti, VP Engineering SDR products, PrismTech.

The Spectra Power Tools product suite is now available for evaluation from PrismTech's website at http://www.prismtech.com/spectra/.

Notes for Editors

About PrismTech

Founded in 1992, with offices in the USA and Europe, PrismTech is a privately held software products company. PrismTech serves international Fortune 500 customers in the telecommunications, data communications, defense and aerospace sectors. PrismTech is an acknowledged leader in productivity tools and middleware, with solutions ranging from wide-scale integration to embedded real-time systems, supporting applications from operations support systems (OSS) through to software defined radio (SDR). For additional information about PrismTech, visit the web site at http://www.prismtech.com.

Spectra and Spectra Power Tools are trademarks of PrismTech. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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