Best in class companies invest the time to precisely engineer the most desired products, and they invest in the tools that drive their progress. A promise of quality and trust defines their business. It’s a promise to an industry, a community, and every individual. TASKING enables industry leading companies to fulfill their promise, one line of code at a time.
Interview with Peter Himmler, Business Development Manager at TASKING.
Easy Engineering: How was 2022 for your business, a short summary?
Peter Himmler: From business perspective the year 2022 is pleasant. Re-establishing in person meetings, conferences and fairs support our growth and make us confident to invest and develop on an even broader product portfolio for the upcoming years.
With the acquisition of iSYSTEM we are further enhancing our safety and security-oriented software ecosystem and broaden our capabilities as a one-stop shop for embedded software development tools and services with a strong emphasis on the automotive safety market and its related applications.
E.E: What products/services did you launch this year?
P.H: We accelerated the buildup of our global organization and accelerate product development this year. This includes some updates of existing products as well as completely new products. Most important for me was the launch of:
- SmartCode v10.1r1, our new multicore development environment for Infineon Next Generation AURIX™ TC4x Microcontroller;
- TriCore Inspector, this is our tool for automated impact analysis within customer code, enabling an efficient and effective risk assessment as well as providing guidance if and how to mitigate known issues;
- ARM Cortex-M Toolset v6.0r1, our multi-core development environment, now supporting also Infineon Infineon’s TRAVEO™ T2G and NXP`s S32K3 Series.
E.E: How did the market change, compared to previous years?
P.H: The overall market didn’t change that much over the last years.
More important for us is the on-going transformation of car manufacturers (OEMs) and their supplier ecosystem. Their view on system and software development for cars is changing tremendous compared to the past, creating new opportunities for TASKING as a tool vendor.
E.E: What are the new challenges in your field of activity?
P.H: Not always new but definitely challenges:
- Find passionate people for our growing business. Safety, security with technically constrain embedded systems paired with C / C++ and compiler knowledge are rare skills
- Support the growing number of different, multicore SoCs with large number of different core architectures from Infineon, ARM, RISC V, Synopsis ARC and others
- Support customer to proof their compliance in regard to all relevant Functional Safety and Cybersecurity standards like ISO 26262 and ISO 21434
E.E: How did you overcome these challenges in this more competitive environment?
P.H: Hard work combined with keeping the eyes open for new aspects, new technology and the inspiring ideas from our new hires in addition to interaction and fruitful discussion with customers and partners.
E.E: Tell us about product innovation and how will it impact the future?
P.H: Our R&D department is fully loaded with adding new instruction set architecture support, new devices and optimization our customer ask for. In addition, we’re adding qualified libraries for safe (re-)use within customers safety system to our portfolio.
Furthermore, the TASKING teams and the iSYSTEM teams are very excited to explore new product innovation. Stay tuned!
E.E: How will product innovation help the customers?
P.H: Our products and product innovation reduce ‘pain’, add value and safe costs for our users.
E.E: What are the industry trends in the markets you are currently active?
P.H: The Software Defined Vehicle (SVD) creates all kind of change within the organizations of OEMs and suppliers. Software and modern tools for software development are now first row citizen often with a dedicated focus from company’s top management.
In addition, the increase in HPC/Zonal architecture, heterogeneous multicore and even OEM-specific SoCs will create a need for dedicated compiler and development tools to enable efficient software development.
TASKING’s strength is to support this organizational change towards software and the development especially for safety and performance critical applications and services.
E.E: What do you think the trends will be next year?
P.H: I do not consider big changes here, as society and industry have to recover from pandemic crises, chip crisis and supply-chain disruption first.
E.E: What is the outlook for 2023?
P.H: As I said before, I am excited about the new opportunities that come from the fact that TASKING and iSYSTEM are now one company. This, together with the trend towards SDV, gives me hope for a good next year for TASKING. Let’s hope for a more peaceful than this year.
