industry safety critical embedded software founded 1985 ; 31 years ago 1985 in kongens lyngby denmark headquarters phoenix arizona key people bob morris president ceo dr. ole n.oest founder cto products real time operating systems deos heartos compiler systems ada website www.ddci.com ddc i inc. is a privately held company providing software development of real time operating systems software development tools and software services for safety critical embedded applications headquartered in phoenix arizona . it was first created in 1985 as the danish firm ddc international a s also known as ddc i a s a commercial outgrowth of dansk datamatik center a danish software research and development organization of the 1980s . the american subsidiary was created in 1986 . for many years the firm specialized in language compilers for the programming language ada . in 2003 the danish office was closed and all operations moved to the phoenix location . contents 1 origins 2 ada compiler 3 ada 95 and explorations of other product lines 4 u.s. headquarters and real time operating systems 5 products 6 bibliography 7 references 8 external links origins edit the origins of ddc international a s lay in dansk datamatik center a danish software research and development organization that was formed in 1979 to demonstrate the value of using modern techniques especially those involving formal methods in software design and development . among its several projects was the creation of a compiler system for the programming language ada . ada was a difficult language to implement and early compiler projects for it often proved disappointments . 1 but the ddc compiler design was sound and it first passed the united states department of defense sponsored ada compiler validation capability acvc tests on a vax vms system in september 1984 . 2 as such it was the first european ada compiler to meet this standard . 3 4 success of the ada project led to a separate company being formed in 1985 called ddc international a s with the purpose of commercializing the ada compiler system product . 5 like its originator it was based in lyngby denmark . ole n. oest was named the managing director of ddc international . 6 in 1986 ddc i inc. was founded as the american subsidiary company . 7 located in phoenix arizona it focused on sales customer support and engineering consulting activities in the united states . 8 ada compiler edit ddc international a s was housed in a converted textile mill in lyngby denmark here seen in 1990 . ddc i established a business in selling the ada compiler system product named dacs directly to firms both as software to develop projects in ada with and as source code to computer makers and others who would rehost or retarget it to other processors and operating systems . the first business sold both native compilers and cross compilers with the latter more common since ada was primarily used in the embedded systems realm . one of the first cross compilers that ddc i developed was from vax vms to the intel 8086 and intel 80286 ; the effort was already underway by early 1985 . 9 it began as a joint venture with the italian defense electronics company selenia that would target both their mara 860 and mara 286 multi microprocessor computers based on the 8086 and 80286 architectures and generic embedded and os hosting 8086 and 80286 systems . 10 this work was the start of what would become the largest selling product line for the firm . ddc i developed a reputation for quality ada cross compilers and runtime systems for intel 80x86 processors . 8 the second business made use of what became termed the ddc oem compiler kit 11 who could be using the ada front end for compilers to other hosts or targets or for other tools such as vlsi . in a september 1985 meeting in lund sweden several of the oem kit customers formed the ddc ada compiler retargeter s group . 12 it held at least three meetings over the course of 1985 and 1986 . the early oem customers included the university of lund defence materiel administration and ericsson radio systems in sweden ; softplan and nokia information systems in finland ; selenia and olivetti in italy ; icl defence systems and stl ltd in the united kingdom ; aitech software engineering in israel ; and advanced computer techniques rockwell collins control data corporation and general systems group in the united states . 13 several ada compiler developers at ddc international in lyngby in 1990 . later developers were often less well versed in formal methods and did not use them in their work on the compiler . 14 this was even more so in the case of companies retargeting the compiler many of which were unfamiliar with the ada language . 15 16 ddc i was in the same market as several other ada compiler firms including alsys telesoft verdix tartan laboratories and tld systems . 4 ddc i would go on to stay in business longer than any of these others . 14 as with other ada compiler vendors much of the time of ddc i engineers was spent in conforming to the large difficult ada compiler validation capability acvc standardized language and runtime test suite . 17 18 starting in 1988 and continuing for several years ddc i consultants collaborated with honeywell air transport systems to retarget and optimize the ddc i ada compiler to the amd 29050 processor . 19 20 this ddc i based cross compiler system was used to develop the primary flight software for the boeing 777 airliner . 8 20 this software named the airplane information management system would become arguably the best known of any ada in use project civilian or military . 21 some 550 developers at honeywell worked on the flight system and it was publicized as a major ada success story . 20 ddc i s development office in new york was on the 31st floor of this building . in october 1991 it was announced that ddc i had acquired the ada and jovial language embedded systems business of interact which had become a venture of advanced computer techniques . 22 this wholly owned new york based entity was briefly named ddc inter 22 before being subsumed into ddc i proper . this brought ada cross compilers for the mil std 1750a and mips r3000 processors and jovial language cross compilers for the mil std 1750a and zilog z8002 into the product line . the mips product was one which ddc i emphasised with engineering efforts that included automatic recognition of certain tasking optimizations 23 and work in the u.s. air force sponsored common ada runtime system carts project towards providing standard interfaces into ada runtime environments . 24 25 at the end of 1993 the new york office was closed and its work transferred to the phoenix office . by the early 1990s ddc i offered ada native compilers for vax vms sun 3 and sparc under sunos and intel 80386 under unix system v and os 2 and offered cross compilers for the motorola 680x0 and intel i860 in addition to the abovementioned targets . 26 27 ada 95 and explorations of other product lines edit the ddc international office in lyngby showed danish design elements here seen in 1992 . in the early 1990s ddc i worked on redesigning the compiler system for the wide ranging ada 95 revision of the language standard . they used a new object based programming design and still adhered to a formal methods approach as well using vdm sl . 28 the work was done under sponsorship of the european community based open microprocessor initiative s global language and uniform environment project omi glue where ddc i s role was to create a compiler targeting the architecture neutral distribution format andf intermediate form with the intention of bringing ada 95 to more platforms quickly . 28 29 as part of this work ddc i collaborated with the defence evaluation and research agency in expanding some of andf s abilities to express semantics of ada and the fast growing programming language c . 30 work in ada specific areas such as bounds checking elimination was done to get optimal run time performance . 31 the ada software environment was originally thought to be a promising market . 32 but the ada compiler business proved to be a difficult one to be in . 33 during this time 1987 97 a u.s. government mandate for ada use was in effect albeit with some waivers granted . 34 many of the advantages of the language for general purpose programming were not seen as such by the general software engineering community or by educators . 35 the sales situation was challenging with periodic small layoffs . despite consolidation among other ada tool providers ddc i remained an independent company . 36 in any case ddc i was an enthusiastic advocate of the ada language for use in the company 37 and externally . a paper one of its engineers published in 1993 assessed ada 95 s object oriented features favorably to those of c and attracted some attention . 38 a view of palm trees from the ddc i office in phoenix 1993 . at the same time the firm attempted to expand and augment its product line . the raise toolset was available as was cedar a design tool for real time systems . also offered was beologic a tool to develop and run state event parts of applications that had been licensed from bang & olufsen and integrated with the ada compiler system . 39 the biggest effort was in the direction of c . ddc i began offering 1st object exec a c based real time operating system intended for direct object level support of embedded applications . 40 despite considerable efforts during 1993 94 1st object exec failed to gain traction in the marketplace . the one area where ada did gain a solid foothold was in real time high reliability high integrity safety critical applications such as aerospace . 41 42 43 based on its experience with honeywell and other customers ddc i acquired expertise in the mapping of ada language and runtime features to the requirements of safety critical certifications in particular those for the do 178b software considerations in airborne systems and equipment certification standard and provided tools for that process . 44 such applications continued even after the ada mandate was dropped in 1997 . 34 for instance in 1997 the firm was awarded a joint contract with sikorsky aircraft and boeing defense & space group s helicopters division to develop software to be used in the boeing sikorsky rah 66 comanche . 45 in march 1998 ddc i acquired from texas instruments the development and sales and marketing rights to the tartan ada compilers for the intel i960 motorola 680x0 and mil std 1750a targets . 46 support for mixed language development was added in 2000 with the addition of the programming language c as part of ddc i s mixed language integrated development environment for score for safety critical object oriented real time embedded . 47 leveraging the andf format the dwarf standardized debugging format and the omi protocol for communicating with target board debug monitors score was able to provide a common building and debugging environment for real time application developers . 47 support for embedded c was added to score in 2003 by which time it could integrate with a variety of target board scenarios on intel x86 and power pc processors . 48 the c and embedded c compilers for andf came from a licensing arrangement for the tendra compiler later ddc i became the maintainer of those compilers . subsequently ada 95 support for the older 1750a and tms320c4x processors was added to score .