BSC sells its first spin-off Maspatechnologies SL to Danlaw, a global leader in connected car and automotive electronics

Photo: BSC website.

Danlaw Inc., a leading global automotive and aerospace electronics solutions provider, has acquired Maspatechnologies SL, 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 7 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.

Raju Dandu, Chairman of Danlaw, Inc., said: “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. We are excited to leverage the world-class hardware technology and engineering talent that we are acquiring to help our customers in the Avionics and Automotive industries certify their multicore platforms and applications.”

Dan McClung, CEO of Rapita Systems group, commented: “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."

Mateo Valero, Director of BSC, says: “The sale of Maspatechnologies provides evidence of BSC’s commitment to the development of outstanding, relevant research that has a real impact on society. 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, Maspatechnologies Co-Founder, Co-Leader of the CAOS research group at BSC commented: “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.”

This article was first published on 15 November by Barcelona Supercomputing Center.