As reported briefly last week (CI No 1,386), SD-Scicon Plc’s Software Technology Centre has won a multi-million pound contract to supply its Ada cross compiler XD-Ada to the consortium that hopes to be building the European Fighter Aircraft – if the project goes ahead. The consortium’s four members are British Aerospace (co-incidentally a shareholder in SD-Scicon), Messerschmitt Blkow Blohm of West Germany, Aeritalia of Italy and Spain’s CASA – but the West German government is getting cold feet about the project and the Italians aren’t sure that they can afford their share. The contract makes the Camberley-based Technology Centre the single source of supply for the Ada toolset among the subcontractors within the Fighter project. It will also provide subcontractors with training and support and is in charge of sorting out bugs, reissuing toolsets and keeping the compiler up to date with new US Department of Defense validations for Ada. However, SD-Scicon is confident that the Fighter project will freeze before the next version of Ada appears. SD-Scicon developed the compiler with DEC and each company paid its own research and development costs. The compiler will be used to cross-compile the software written in Ada from the VAX/VMS development system over to the Motorola 68000 embedded processors used in the aircraft. SD-Scicon has an arrangement with DEC to supply off-the-shelf Ada software along with XD Ada. It will also supply the maths package from the American Algorithms Group and a simulator from Marconi Software. SD-Scicon guesstimates that the contract is worth UKP5m in revenue over the next four years, but it expects more revenue to come from the associated Eurojet project and from production phases not yet in. Furthermore, subcontractors are only licensed to use XD Ada on the Eurofighter project, so if they want to use XD Ada again they must pay. SD-Scicon is particularly pleased to win the contract because it means that Eurofighter will set XD Ada up as a common standard and give the company a new European user base.
