The MathWorks and Altia Form Technology Partnership to Provide Powerful Rapid Prototyping Environment.

NATICK, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 27, 1998--

New Software Integration Will Allow Design Engineers to

Eliminate Costly Errors Early in the Development Cycle

A technology partnership announced today between The MathWorks, Inc. and Altia, Inc. will enable design engineers to show their customers a complete model of complex, interactive systems by creating a graphical prototype with the final system's look and behavior. By integrating The MathWorks modeling and simulation software, Simulink(R) and Stateflow(tm), with Altia's Altia(R) Design software, the two companies will allow engineering departments to cut design costs and time by reducing the need for multiple physical engineering prototypes and long development cycles.

Altia Design is simulation graphics software that enables engineers to create graphical prototypes and designs of custom user interfaces and connect them to external simulation packages such as Simulink and Stateflow. Unlike graphical user interface builders or graphics toolkits, which use a limited set of standard user interface components, Altia Design enables designers to create fully customized, dynamic user interfaces that accurately simulate their physical counterparts and display real-time data and information. Because Altia Design is used throughout the development lifecycle, prototypes are refined and often turned into final product interfaces.

Simulink and Stateflow combine to form the industry's first embedded systems design software that enables engineers to create executable specifications, or "virtual prototypes," of embedded systems to improve quality, reduce costs, and speed their time-to-market. Simulink allows users to graphically model a system's entire design -- even prior to partitioning the hardware and software -- to validate its behavior and functionality before beginning more expensive detailed design. The software significantly extends an engineer's ability to specify, model, analyze and prototype complex, real-time systems found in the aerospace, automotive and telecommunications industries.

This integration is significant because engineers can now provide customers with a clear understanding of how a product will work before actually building it. Customers can even be shown alternate examples and then interact with the prototype to clearly demonstrate various design concepts. By integrating customer feedback earlier in the development cycle, engineers can eliminate costly errors and design changes.

"Within Delphi Automotive Systems, we are working aggressively to provide an integrated development environment, built upon industry tools, which support our product development teams," said Tom Fuelle, open systems architecture at Delphi Delco Electronics Systems. "I expect this new integration to provide Delphi with the ability to better specify, model and simulate our ECU (electronic control unit) designs with our customer and thus, greatly decrease our 'time to proto' deliveries for customer evaluation. Long term, I think this is a fantastic step in pursuing 'virtual design buy-off' with the intent of drastically reducing cost and time-to-market for production ECU's."

Customers of Altia and The MathWorks span the aerospace, telecommunications and automotive industries, with applications ranging from network simulators and communications equipment to instrumentation such as dashboard and cockpit controls, and medical and business machines.

Using Altia Design's robust graphical editor, engineers can easily prototype a graphical human machine interface using pre-built components such as buttons, meters, dials, CRT displays, trackballs and keypads. Developers can also use the editor to create custom interactive components, eliminating the need to write thousands of lines of graphics code. Using Simulink and Stateflow, engineers can capture the behavior and functionality of the logic behind the interface prototype and validate it. Once the prototype and its underlying behavior is completed, C code can be automatically generated from the Simulink models to be used for further off-line testing or for building the product.

"It's difficult to ensure that a real-time system's logic is correct without actually building the system. By using Altia's software to create a graphical prototype of the Simulink behavioral model, developers can show their customers that a system will behave as intended and test its functionality," said Mike Dickens, director of marketing at The MathWorks.

As a customer tests the system using the Altia Design prototype, the software transparently records the user interaction and plays it back to engineers so they can make adjustments to improve the design. When engineers change the Simulink model, the adjustments are sent to the Altia interface. Changes made to the Altia interface are also automatically sent to the model.

"This integration enables engineers to simulate complex systems, build the logic behind the simulation and clearly communicate the results to customers. By providing a more complete picture early in the development process, customers will see if the system meets their specifications," said Michael Juran, president of Altia.

Pricing and Availability

Simulink and Stateflow and Altia Design are available immediately. List price for the first seat of Simulink and Stateflow begins at $6,000 for PCs, which includes MATLAB. List price for a single license of a complete Altia Design system is $9,900 for UNIX and $5,900 for PCs, with discounts for multi-license purchases.

About The MathWorks

Established in 1984, The MathWorks, Inc., a company of 500 based in Natick, Mass., develops, markets, and supports MATLAB, Simulink, and a family of data analysis toolboxes for engineers, scientists, and technical professionals. MATLAB provides the foundation and computational engine for all of The MathWorks products. Widely recognized as the industry's premier language for technical computing, MATLAB provides comprehensive math and visualization functionality, and a powerful high-level language for users to interactively explore, analyze, design, and prototype solutions to their problems. Simulink is a graphical, block-diagram environment for modeling, analyzing, and simulating a broad range of dynamic nonlinear systems. Application toolboxes are available for specialized functions. The MathWorks products are used throughout the world in industries such as automotive, aerospace, environmental, telecommunications, computer peripherals, finances, and medical. More than 400,000 users at the world's leading industrial, government, and education organizations rely on The MathWorks products for tremendous gains in productivity.

About Altia

Altia, Inc. is a privately held company formed in 1991 as a supplier of prototyping and simulation graphics software for embedded product design. The Altia Design development system is a combination of graphics, animation and control editors along with an extensive library of pre-built graphics and control components. The package allows developers to quickly create fully functional, interactive user interface prototypes and animated graphics -- without programming. Altia Design can be used stand-alone or in combination with simulation tools and programming languages such as C, C++, Visual Basic and Java. A royalty-free run-time license, as well as support for Altia's ProtoPlay browser plug-in, is included to simplify distribution of created designs. Altia Design is sold in the U.S. directly by Altia, Inc., and in Europe, Japan and the Far East through distributors. Altia is located at 5030 Corporate Plaza Drive, Colorado Springs, CO, 80919. Tel: [phone], Fax: [phone], Web: www.altia.com