Model-driven development speeds handler design

German semiconductor equipment manufacturer and market leader in gravity and MEMS handling, Multitest has cut the development time of new software products in half through deploying Rhapsody.

German semiconductor equipment manufacturer and market leader in gravity and MEMS handling, Multitest has cut the development time of new software products in half through deploying Rhapsody by I-Logix.

Rhapsody's initial application was the design and generation of full production quality code for InStrip, Multitest's most feature rich line of test handling systems.

InStrip is designed for panels and lead frames from 20 x 150 to 100 x 300mm, as well as all leaded and leadless devices with a pitch down to 0.4mm.

Because of InStrip's expansive list of options, this ambient-hot strip handler for all current SO, QPF, MLF and BGA devices has started to attract customers from across all industries including the consumer, automotive, RF and logic markets.

This unprecedented demand for shorter time to market was successfully met by using Rhapsody's model-driven development technology.

The success of this deployment of Rhapsody has prompted a company-wide adoption.

"Our goal is to get more reliable products to market faster and by investing in Rhapsody we are realising that goal", said Karl Funke, Multitest President and CEO.

"Thanks to Rhapsody, Multitest has saved roughly 40% of the total cost of development while increasing the reliability of the code and delivering in half the time".

Multitest previously used conventional real-time and multitasking frameworks written in C and assembler.

Now, with Rhapsody Multitest is able to create transparent and maintainable designs, integrating mechanical design engineers into the process by using state diagrams.

Another key benefit for Multitest was the automatic documentation for the software, ensuring that the documentation and the design are in sync at all times.

"While selecting a programming environment for this type of project, we reviewed both Rhapsody and Rational Rose, eventually settling on Rhapsody", said Dr Andreas Piepenbrink, Electronic Development Engineering Manager for Multitest.

"Based on the recommendation of Siemens and Rhapsody's ability to adapt to different RTOS environments, the decision to use Rhapsody by I-Logix was a simple one".

"We are very happy with Multitest's decision to utilise Rhapsody as their model-driven development tool of choice", said Neeraj Chandra, I-Logix Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development.

"Multitest is a prime example of how simple it is for a company using a code-based approach to successfully implement a model-driven solution having no prior experience with UML".

I-Logix Rhapsody is an award-winning, UML-compliant, systems design, application development, and collaboration platform.

Rhapsody is used by design and development teams to deliver real-time embedded applications in C, C++, Java and Ada.

Rhapsody uniquely combines a graphical UML programming paradigm with advanced systems design and analysis capabilities and seamlessly links with the target implementation language, resulting in a complete model-driven development environment, from requirements capture through analysis, design, implementation, and test.

Operating on either an engineering workstation or PC, Rhapsody has the ability to "execute" graphical models and debug behaviour at the design level, both at the host as well as the target, produce test vectors and generate production-quality code within a single development environment.

Using Rhapsody, developers can maintain applications at the code level through graphical models.

If changes are made to the model, the application code changes as well to correspond to the modifications; if the code is altered, the models are dynamically updated.

The dynamic, bidirectional link between the code and the design documentation ensures that Rhapsody is ideally suited for all members of the design team.

Rhapsody also incorporates automatic test generation and web-based model debugging to enable design for testability.

Leveraging these innovative techniques via an intuitive user interface, Rhapsody dramatically boosts productivity and dramatically improves team collaboration, quality and re-use, leading to significantly compressed development cycles.

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