AbsInt provides advanced development tools for embedded systems, and tools for validation, verification and certification of safety-critical software.
Founded in 1998, the privately-held company now employs 40+ people from six nations, all located at our headquarters in Germany.
Our customers come from 40+ countries around the globe, including the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, and almost all member states of the EU. We have distribution agreements with major software distributors in Asia, North and South America, the Middle East, and across Europe.
The company name is an acronym for “abstract interpretation”, an approach to static program analysis formalized in 1977 at the Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory by Patrick and Radhia Cousot.
Background and mission
The embedded market of today is characterized by ever-growing software complexity and ever-shorter development times. The share of safety-critical applications is rising.
AbsInt’s tools are designed to
- increase software safety
- reduce time-to-market
- streamline testing and validation
- improve software efficiency
- reduce system costs for embedded, real-time, safety-critical applications
Two-minute introduction on YouTube
Our tools are based on a generic and generative framework which allows an extremely quick, sound and flexible response to customer needs. This has been proven time and again by outstanding customer satisfaction and in a decades-long series of 30+ successful research projects.
Analysis and verification tools
Software testing accounts for a major part of development costs. This is especially true for real-time systems, where correctness depends not just on logical correctness, but also on the timeliness of the results. Timing properties are hard to establish; measuring and time-stopping methods are error-prone and time-consuming.
Static program analyses provide means to reduce testing and validation costs. The underlying theory of abstract interpretation enables the systematic derivation of provably correct analyses. The analyses are performed at compile time and are sound: they provide results that hold for any program execution and any possible input scenario.
Timing validation for real-time software
Our award-winning aiT WCET Analyzer is the first software tool for verifying that safety-critical applications always react fast enough. Since 2002, aiT is used by Airbus France for validating the timing behavior of critical avionics software.
Proving the absence of stack overflow
Our StackAnalyzer automatically computes the worst-case stack usage of the tasks in embedded applications. This reduces development effort and helps prevent runtime errors due to stack overflow.
Proving the absence of runtime errors
Our static analyzer Astrée, developed under license from CNRS/ENS, proves the absence of runtime errors in C and C++ programs. Its extremely precise and highly customizable analysis engine enables finding all potential runtime errors while keeping false alarms to a minimum. Even large-scale industrial safety-critical software can be analyzed in just a few hours with zero false alarms.
Certification and qualification
Current safety standards such as ISO 26262, DO-178B/C, IEC-61508, EN-50125 and others require identifying potential functional and non-functional hazards and demonstrating that the software does not violate the relevant safety goals.
Abstract-interpretation based tools such as aiT, StackAnalyzer, and Astrée provide formal verification with 100% complete and reliable results. They are therefore perfectly suited to be used for certification.
The tool qualification process is greatly simplified with the help of our Qualification Support Kits.