ANSYS Acquires Esterel Technologies

By DE Editors

ANSYS has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Esterel Technologies, a provider of embedded software simulation solutions, for a cash purchase price of approximately 42 million (or approximately US$53 million), subject to certain working capital adjustments at close. The agreement also includes retention provisions for key members of management and employees.

Headquartered in Elancourt, France, Esterel has about 80 employees and reported revenues of approximately 15 million for fiscal year 2011. The transaction, currently anticipated to close in the third calendar quarter of 2012, is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

The Esterel SCADE solution enables software and systems engineers to design, simulate and produce embedded software, the control code built into the electronics in aircraft, rail transportation, automotive,  energy systems, medical devices and other industrial products that have central processing units.

Esterel is often chosen when the embedded software is critical for safety and compliance reasons. The company provides software and systems engineers a solution to accurately model and simulate the behavior of the embedded software code to gain insight earlier in the design process and trace it to its requirements. Esterel solutions also reduce engineering time and cost by automatically generating certified and dependable embedded software code from these high fidelity models. The company’s certified code generators are currently compliant with more than 10 certification standards including aerospace, defense, rail transportation, automotive, industrial systems and nuclear plants.

The acquisition of Esterel complements ANSYS software solutions by extending the ANSYS Simulation Driven Product Development vision to encompass both hardware and software systems, according to the company. A combined solution will enable customers to gain greater insight into the behavior of the embedded software as it interacts with the hardware (sometimes called the physical plant) including electrical, mechanical and fluidic sub-systems.

“We are very excited about the model-based embedded code simulation and production solutions Esterel adds to ANSYS, as well as the quality of its 230 global top-tier customers,” said Jim Cashman, president and CEO of ANSYS. “Today’s products are getting smarter. They have more electronics and software and this requires a systems engineering approach to product development. The combination of these two great companies will uniquely enable customers to comprehensively simulate complete systems and predict with confidence that their products will thrive in the real world. Further, we believe that the combination will foster innovation by gaining engineering insight across disciplines that have historically been silos.”

For more information, visit ANSYS and Esterel Technologies.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.