ABB Nera is a telecommunications company with annual sales of more than $200 million. Its Satcom division develops, manufactures, and markets Inmarsat Mobile Satellite terminals and Land earth stations for voice, fax, and data communications. Its products are sold worldwide to meet the needs of ship owners, companies using mobile communications, international organizations using mobile communication systems to operate in remote countries, and telecom administrations.

Development in Ada

ABB Nera’s Ada development consists of mobile terminals for Inmarsat M and Inmarsat B systems and provide voice, fax, and data services to international telephone networks directly from mobile terminals. These systems perform access control, monitoring, alarm handling, antenna steering, man machine interfacing, and satellite protocol handling.

The application was developed entirely in Ada. Using the Alsys development environment hosted on the PC and HP and targeted to the Motorola 68302. A six person team developed about 110,000 lines of code. The overall development represents an effort of 18,000 man hours. SDL was used to specify and design the application.

The Ada Advantages

"Ada was chosen because we wanted to use a modern specification oriented language with object oriented support as well as support for built in checks" mentions Mr. Arne Birkeland, Project Manager, who conducted the development of the application. In comparing languages for use in the project, Ada proved to be more acceptable than Modula 2 and, more importantly, offered better support than C and PLM for object-orientation and built in checks.

In assessing Ada tools, Mr. Birkeland states that Alsys was chosen for its good PC support and the well-known quality of its technology. He especially liked the "good parser and error print out of the Alsys environment." "The support was appropriate to our needs and enabled us to sort out all the problems encountered" he adds. Alsys consultants provided the support ABB Nera needed and Alsys training courses made "novices in Ada able to start quickly" concludes Mr. Birkeland.

Using Ada in the Future

In the future, ABB Nera plans to port the environment to a SPARCstation in order to do development combined with PCs. The upcoming release of Ada 9X, which will include several new and important design capabilities, is of great interest to the companies software developers. They look forward to increased power and flexibility, "especially the Ada 9X Object-Oriented Programming features" states Mr. Birkeland.

For further information, contact:

Mr. Bengt Conradi
Alsys AB
Utsiktsvagen 10
Box 2014
S 149 02 Nynashamn
Sweden
Phone: + 46 852 069 010
Fax: + 46 852 020 965

Reprinted with permission from Alsys, Inc.