Global automotive and aerospace electronics solutions provider, Danlaw, has acquired Maspatechnologies, a spin-off company from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS). Maspatechnologies has joined the Danlaw-owned Rapita Systems group and will operate as Rapita Systems SL from offices in Barcelona.
Maspatechnologies brings technology to verify and certify the software timing behavior of multicore processors used in safety-critical embedded systems. This includes hardware analysis, interference generators, multicore contention modeling and surrogate applications. These tools and services are used to identify and measure the impact of interference on share resources within multicore-hosted software applications. The acquisition expands the specialized multicore verification expertise within the Rapita Systems group and provides industry an end-to-end solution for analyzing and certifying the next generation of multicore embedded avionics and automotive systems.
Maspatechnologies’ groundbreaking work on the analysis of multicore hardware platforms was pioneered at the BSC-CNS. Recently, Maspatechnologies played a key role in Airbus’ successful certification of the first ever “fully-automatic air-to-air refueling (A3R) operation with a boom system”. As part of this project, Maspatechnologies provided timing analysis and characterization services to Airbus that were key to building a CAST-32A compliant certification argument for this multicore avionics system.
Maspatechnologies is the first spin-off to be sold by BSC and was made possible by BSC’s investment in technology transfer. BSC’s 11 spin-off companies have created 121 jobs and raised €8.5 million in financing rounds in six years, with 5 companies created since 2020. These new companies offer cutting-edge services in areas as diverse as biomedicine, security, the aerospace and automotive industries and quantum computing.
“Maspatechnologies joining our Danlaw family enables us to comprehensively address a key disruption in the safety-critical embedded industry – the adoption of high-performance multicore processors,” said Raju Dandu, dhairman of Danlaw. “Looking ahead, we believe that this acquisition demonstrates Danlaw’s focus on value creation through advanced technology transfer to meet the rapidly changing needs of the Avionics and Automotive industries.”
Dan McClung, CEO of Rapita Systems group added, “This acquisition demonstrates our commitment to supporting the future of the embedded industry, which will depend upon the adoption of multicore technology. The Maspatechnologies team brings together leading domain-experts who, in combination with Rapita’s existing tooling and expertise, offers the only viable commercially available path to multicore certification.”
“The sale of Maspatechnologies provides evidence of BSC’s commitment to the development of outstanding, relevant research that has a real impact on society,” said Mateo Valero, director of BSC. “We look forward to further BSC spin-off companies succeeding similarly and creating more high-quality jobs and bringing international investment to our region. This success has a tangible impact and demonstrates the return on investment that the funding of BSC can deliver.”
Francisco J. Cazorla, co-leader of the CAOS research group at BSC and Maspatechnologies co-founder said: “I am glad to see that the research we started over a decade ago at BSC has matured into industry-ready technology for the embedded industry. This has been achieved thanks to the effort of many BSC experts including Jaume Abella (co-founder of Maspatechnologies) and BSC’s Technology Transfer office. Looking forward, I am excited to be joining the Rapita Systems family as Senior Technical Fellow and continuing this important work that is key to facilitating the adoption of multicore processors in the safety-critical embedded industry.”
About Rapita Systems group
Rapita Systems group provides on-target software verification tools and services globally to the embedded aerospace and automotive electronics industries. Its solutions help to increase software quality and deliver evidence to meet safety and certification objectives and reduce project costs. The group provides the world’s leading commercial solution, MACH178, for timing analysis to support the certification of multicore systems, including systems developed to meet DO-178C guidelines and MIL standards.
About Danlaw
Danlaw is a global leader in connected car and automotive electronics. Its family of over 800 people live, breathe, and create innovative technology for some of the world’s largest car makers. Danlaw is known for providing ground-breaking technology, efficient development, and adaptive solutions for dynamic environments. Its world-class connected vehicle solutions make it one of the largest suppliers of connected gadgets in the world.
About Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS)
BSC is the leading supercomputing center in Spain, specializing in high-performance computing. BSC has a dual role: providing infrastructure and a supercomputing service for Spanish and European scientists and generating knowledge and technology to be transferred to society. It is a member of the top-level European research infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) and manages the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). BSC is a public consortium owned by the Spanish Government Ministry of Science and Innovation (60%), the Catalan Government Department of Business and Knowledge (30%) and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (10%).