Apart from Control System Design and Implementation, Pathway Technologies Inc provides solutions for companies that want to reduce the design cycle times and decrease the costs associated with control system design and implementation. We can help you setup a cost-effective, PC based, rapid prototyping environment for rapid testing of your control system designs. We assemble and deliver PC104 architecture based real-time targets for Embedded Systems and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation . The real-time targets we provide feature a wide variety of I/O interface modules (such as A/D, D/A, counters, DIO etc...) that will satisfy typical rapid prototyping needs.

Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation
Embedded systems play a very important part in the control of various Mechanical, Aerospace, Chemical and other types of systems. A controller, intended for use in a production control system, needs to be tested as a part of the system. However, actual systems can be very expensive. This makes it necessary to test the controller on a simulation of the system, which has led to the introduction and acceptance of Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation. HIL simulation is used for testing embedded control systems before deployment. Once the controller performs satisfactorily in the HIL simulation, it is transferred to and tested on the actual system.

Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing
Before a new system is put together it is essential to test individually and make sure that all components and sub-systems perform as required. Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) applications are used by engineers to simulate, evaluate and validate such components and sub-systems during development of new systems. Rather than testing these components in complete system setups, HIL allows the testing of new components and prototypes while communicating with software models that simulate the rest of the system. The new components being tested (hardware) respond to the simulated signals (generated by the software models) as through they were operating in a real system. Replacing the rest of the system with computers running software simulations greatly reduces the size and complexity of applications. This type of an environment gives a test engineer much more flexibility and also allows him to run many different tests in a short time, thus increasing the productivity.

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