A second set of eyes never goes amiss. Whether you’re asking your partner to read over a job application before you send it in, doing a spell check on an email, or checking code in a safety-critical application—it’s important to catch errors.
That’s why we here at New Eagle are pleased to share Raptor-Safe, our newest suite of tools that supports safe development and verification for your Raptor-developed software. Keep reading to find out exactly what it is, how it works, and what benefits you’ll enjoy.
What Is Raptor-Safe Stack Check?
Raptor-Safe Stack Check is the first release in a new software suite that supports functional safety development. Fully integrated with our Raptor-Dev library, Raptor Stack Check automatically calculates critical flow control errors, like:
- worst-case stack usage beyond allowed limits,
- potential recursive calls, and
- loops that may not terminate.
Avoiding such errors is essential in safety-critical systems, where latent defects can result in hazardous situations, injuries, or worse. Raptor-Safe Stack Check catches glitches early in the development process before they become a problem.
How Does Raptor-Safe Stack Check Work?
Raptor-Safe Stack Check combines the speed and ease of model-based development with the accuracy of C code. It measures the worst-case stack consumption for all entry points in your application software. Because it analyzes the executable directly, the analysis accurately reflects what you’ll experience when running on hardware—unlike solutions that only analyze source code.
Top Three Benefits of Raptor-Safe Stack Check
Errors that crop up early in development can waste valuable time and money while delaying functional safety certifications. With this all-new Raptor tool, you’ll expend fewer resources without sacrificing exacting standards. Check out these top three benefits.
1. Major Time- and Cost-Savings
Proving a system is free of stack errors through exhaustive testing is notoriously difficult. Such errors commonly present themselves only during the software integration phase, and they often only occur in very precise contexts, making them exceptionally difficult to debug. Raptor-Safe Stack Check uses formal methods to compute a worst-case upper bound for the stack size in minutes, resulting in a formal guarantee the system is free of such errors. By saving many hours of time and labor, the costs associated with Raptor-Safe Stack Check licensing are often recuperated by the detection of a single issue, when compared against the engineering effort to root cause the same issue through legacy manual methods.
2. Helps You Meet Functional Safety Standards
When you’re working with safety-critical systems, it’s imperative to meet rigorous safety standards, including:
These standards require evidence that safety-critical software components are free from interference by other portions of the system. Raptor-Safe Stack Check provides the proof you need with tailored reports and documentation, qualified for use in ISO26262, DO-178B/C, and IEC-61508 development processes. You can archive reports, present them to your customers or review boards, and generate unique graphs that visualize the flow of your code. Standard-specific qualification kits are available upon request.
3. Speed, Ease, and Exactitude
Thanks to the automated, integrated flow between Raptor-Dev and Raptor Stack Check, you get the speed and ease of model-based development with the ability to tackle thorny issues most commonly debugged at the C code layer. This level of integration enables controls engineers to identify defects that typically require software engineers to troubleshoot the root cause.
Speed Up Development Without Sacrificing Time and Safety
Save valuable time in development by uncovering issues early in your process automatically – before hardware even comes into the picture. Not only will you avoid integration problems down the line, you’ll also speed production up by weeks or months by spending just minutes to flag issues. Contact our team today to learn more or download our functional safety planning guide to get started.
