Venture Development Corp. (VDC) attended both the 2006 Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose and the LinuxWorld Expo in Boston last week. This article from VDC's Embedded Systems Industry Bulletin presents a summary of those two events, along with VDC's picks for its annual “embeddie” awards, conferred on the best ESC… announcements, demos, and giveaways. Enjoy . . . !

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Embedded Systems Bulletin — April 2006

by Chris Lanfear, Director; Steve Balacco, Senior Analyst; Matt Volckmann, Senior Analyst

This year's West Coast ESC show moved back to San Jose. The weeklong event featured most of the usual suspects along with a number of new entrants — with the main show floor emptying into the hall overflowing with additional exhibitors. Despite the rainy weather earlier in the week, vendors saw a fair amount of traffic by midday Wednesday.

The “Embeddies” go to…

Best of Show

CoWare Virtual Platform/Virtual Platform Developer – Announced a week prior to the show, CoWare's unveiling of its Virtual Platform solution addresses a number of the key trends VDC has seen in the industry of late: multicore design, open standards-based development, and the integration of ESL [“electronic system level”] into the software development process. CoWare's platform enables software development and validation through a SystemC-based hardware modeling/simulation environment. The solution includes the Virtual Platform Designer (targeted at IP vendors, semiconductor companies, and/or OEMs, and complemented by the company's other ESL-focused solutions) and the companion Virtual Platform that can be integrated with other development environments through Eclipse to simulate hardware during the software development process.

CoWare is certainly not alone in its vision of more closely combining the development of software and hardware, and it is too early to claim that widespread adoption of a unified development process is the currently reality. However, VDC believes that the company is in a unique position to bridge the gap between EDA, ESL, and software development. The launch of the product signals the beginning of a movement toward a more tightly integrated hardware and software design process, and a growing opportunity within the system simulation market. For more information on this release visit CoWare.

Best of Show honorable mentions

LDRA TBreq — TBreq creates test specifications and executable test cases directly from requirements. Test results are automatically returned to the requirements management tool to provide round-trip traceability. The tool maps test specifications, unit test scenarios, test data and code coverage verification with high level and design requirements. TBreq interfaces directly with popular requirements management tools like DOORS, RequisitePro, Word, or Excel.

Green Hills u-VelOSity — Green Hills new OS is tuned for small footprint applications requiring fast execution where a royalty business model is the right license. Requiring only 1.6 KB ROM and 1KB RAM, micro velocity pushes Green Hills into very low-end application segments.

Best Demo

The Echelon Pyxos Communications Platform was the winner in this category. The demo featured a carpet runner with a sensor mesh underneath it that tracked movements and activated lights, fans and other wall-mounted appliances as a person moved along the carpet. The demo was configurable via a wall-mounted panel. The underlying technology being demonstrated was Pyxos communications chips and network. As always VDC's main criteria for its best demo is that it is based on a real application.

Best Giveaway Items

Express Logic is the winner here with its multi-layered swag scheme of monkeys, limos, and printers. All attendees of the Express Logic magic show got a monkey — everyone loves a monkey. The Express Logic limo passes were back and the company gave away 20 HP printers with its ThreadX RTOS inside.

Walking the floor

“I am DSO” (Click to enlarge)

With a large white dome set up prominently in the middle of the show floor it was clear that Wind River Systems, encircled by vendor partners, was trying to make the point that there were two types of exhibitors at ESC — those inside the DSO World tent, and the rest of the embedded market. Half of their exhibit space was dedicated to an 8-panel movie presentation hall decorated with first-raised executives and the caption “I am DSO.” Inside, a short movie explained how DSO [Device Software Optimization] has rescued the embedded market from the “chaos,” “frustration,” and “complexity” of the days of old, and ushered in a new “revolution” of “interoperability” and “OS choice.” There was no shortage of drama here.

“DSO World” hosted a series of discussions and panels, with executive leadership from Enea, IBM/Rational, the Eclipse Foundation, OSDL, Intel, and others. Just off the announcement in late March that it would acquire mobility middleware provider Interpeak software and a launch of an initiative to drive standardization of muiltcore processing architectures, Wind River also launched a new campaign aimed at encouraging MontaVista users to switch to Wind River Linux. The new program provides support for the MontaVista kernel through its extensive services organization that includes additional relationships with professional services providers such as India-based Wipro. The announcement clearly indicates that Wind River expects nothing less than to lead the commercial Linux market going forward.

Enea not only talked DSO at ESC, participating in Wind River's DSO world, but they also looked to make it a reality, announcing an initiative with MontaVista to create a better integrated telecom device platform. The two companies announced that they would jointly develop a solution for network equipment based on MontaVista Linux and Enea OSE, Polyhedra, and new middleware solution, Element.

Green Hills Software announced the release of the u-VelOSity microkernel. With memory requirements of less than 2 KB and the common API structure with VelOSity and Integrity, the small footprint OS will give companies more flexibility to write applications for product platforms where manufacturers may want to scale their devices in terms of features and/or processing power. The company also announced that its TimeMachine product would now be able to get wider use from development teams working on platforms without built-in trace support with the release of In-Memory and TraceEdge-PCI data collection capabilities for its latest TimeMachine release.

Green Hills's continued drive to the smaller footprint end of the OS market seems to be further confirmation for companies like Express Logic that there is real opportunity here. Further evidence was provided directly from Express Logic itself, with the company announcing the release of a smaller, faster ThreadX V5 and conservatively asserting that its ThreadX RTOS now powers over 300 million known devices worldwide across a number of wireless networking, office automation, and consumer electronics products.

Just to make things less confusing, there will soon be one less company ending in “logic” to worry about. Telelogic's acquisition of I-logix is all but a done deal, however, the two were both in attendance at their own booths, with I-logix's lively demonstrations still drawing significant interest. With an impressive combined suite of best-in-class tools, the new Telelogic/I-logix will be able to compete even more effectively against rival IBM/Rational and others within the embedded modeling and ALM spaces. This combination is now a solution to beat.

“RTOS companies are doing lots of one-offs and are unable to leverage those products across multiple fronts.” — President, RTOS vendor

One of the most notable trends was the strong presence of ESL vendors at the show. In additional to CoWare, semiconductor IP supplier ARM was also highlighting the launch of the 3.0 version of its Real-View Development Suite that boasts enhanced compiler optimization, a debugger with multicore DSP awareness, and interoperability with GNU tools and ESL tools such as the company's own RealView CREATE ESL solutions. VirtuTech announced that Wind River Systems had chosen its Simics platform for the development of BSPs and other device software, and also noted that it had made a simulation model of the dual-core Freescale MPC8641D available. MIPS Technologies announced that Green Hills Software and QNX would support the company's multi-threading MIPS32 34K family, and that Green Hills also would support the MIPS32 24KE integrated DSP family. A number of other ESL/EDA-focused vendors were in attendance including Cadence, Carbon Systems, CriticalBlue, Synopsys, and VaST.

There was also a significant presence from the test automation side of the house. Klockwork announced an alliance with QNX to integrate its K7 static analysis tools into the Momentics platform. In addition to the impressive Tbreq product demo, LDRA was on the heels of an announcement in mid-March that it had assisted Lockheed Martin with a C++ coding standard used in the JSF Air Vehicle Systems division. Coverity and Polyspace were also in attendance at the show.

With the interest in multicore growing, the time seems right for companies acutely addressing the space, such as Polycore, the vendor offering Poly-Messenger, a solution for inter-core communication.

“Asynchronous multiprocessing is the most disruptive force I have seen in all my years in the business.” — Sven Brehmer, founder of Polycore

In addition to announcing its new Multi-Core Expedite Program to give customers advanced access to prototypes of Intel hardware platforms, QNX released its new Neutrino Multi-Core TDK, a tool for developing on multi-core processors.

The news from the Eclipse Foundation that they were beginning new initiatives around the embedded market for their Device Software Development Platform (DSDP) and C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) projects should not have come as a surprise to those following the industry. Whether they truly back the standard or not, most vendors in the industry have positioned themselves to support Eclipse to some degree. The continued development of the Eclipse framework should only serve to improve the functionality of tools integrated through Eclipse.

Jaluna, which recently announced its commitment to the efforts of the Eclipse Foundation, was found in the TI booth with a demonstration of its Jaluna OSware supporting an Amino-built IP set-top box running both DSP/BIOS and Linux on a TMS320DM64x. In addition to the set top box market the company has also had customer success with its virtualization solution in the telecom and mobile phone markets.

Utilizing Oracle's Times Ten In Memory Database, RTI introduced RTI Distributed Data Management version 3, a new solution for making real-time data available across both enterprise and embedded environments. The company will also be working more closely with OCI to support CORBA and DDS standards.

ENCIRQ announced the release of Version 2.2 of it PL/SQL-based Data-Centric Software Framework offering. The company continued to demonstrate how using a higher-level language to build applications can reduce development-time and improve productivity.

Aonix and Lynuxworks announced a strategic partnership whereby Lynuxworks will market Aonix products along with its LynxOS and LynxOS-178B. The two companies are looking to solidify their success in the military/aerospace and other markets. Aonix's PERC real-time virtual machine recently replaced JavaRT at L-3 Telemetry for the company's new System 550 upgrade, and Lynuxworks is working with Curtis Wright Controls to build modular computing systems for the military/aerospace and industrial markets. Lynuxworks also announced that Xperex has adopted the BlueCat Linux OS for a number of its retail automation products.

Quadros announced that it had partnered with Jinvani Systech to create an integrated RTXC/SDIO protocol stack. It also announced a new port of RTXC to the XScale PXA27x.

National Instruments continues to get the message out that they are working to serve the needs of embedded device developers. The company publicly released the fact that LabView Embedded would now support Analog Device's Blackfin processor.

Other notes of interest:

• Connect One released a low-cost, low-power consumption programmable Internet controller chip called the iChip CO120SQ
• Datalight highlighted its recently released 4GR Flash File System and an upgraded FlashFX Pro Flash Manager product.
• Echelon announced that Shaogang Iron and Steel Group would use the LonWorks Networking Platform for energy management.
• Lantronix announced the addition of 802.11b/g wireless functionality for WiPort at the show and recently released the Xpress DR+, a product to simplify network connectivity for a wide range of embedded devices.
• Macraigor Systems released two new USB 2.0 JTAG debug interface devices in March, usb2Demon and usb2Sprite, now available on ARM, PowerPC, and XScale processors.

“This show is a disappointment. It seems that Boston just isn't working out as a venue for the Winter LinuxWorld Expo, as the Summer show in San Francisco is huge compared to this one and of course open source is bigger than ever. Most shocking about the show is the fact that the two anchor tenants, HP and IBM, are missing from the exhibition floor.” — Bruce Perens speech at LinuxWorld Expo Boston 2006

LinuxWorld Boston

The LinuxWorld Boston show saw much less participation from embedded ISVs, as most of these companies were significantly focused on the San Jose show. Key embedded vendors not in attendance included MontaVista, Lynuxworks, TimeSys, and Jaluna. Although Red Hat and Novell exhibited at the show, their focus was primarily on the enterprise market. However, there were a number of interesting exhibitors included Concurrent, Coverity, Palmsource, the Eclipse Foundation, and Trolltech. Also in the Palmsource booth were Wind River Systems and the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum.

Copyright (c) 2006 Venture Development Corp.. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission by LinuxDevices.com. This article was originally published in VDC's Embedded Systems Industry Bulletin, which VDC publishes in support of its “Embedded Software Strategic Market Intelligence Program“. VDC has been providing embedded systems market intelligence for 20 years.

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