[Updated May 1, 2003] — Here's embedded industry analyst VDC's report on the Embedded Systems Conference held last week in San Francisco . . .

ESC SF 2003 was last week and VDC was there. The estimate was that there were about 12,000 attendees and approximately 300 exhibitors. This year the show collapsed back into one hall from two. This made for a much more manageable show for analysts and attendees alike. Feedback from exhibitors indicated that the quality of attendees was very high, and that OEMs were only sending their staff if they had a specific reason to attend.

Wind River Systems returned to embedded systems after taking the Boston show off. While they continue to attend vertical market specific shows (in fact they announced today that they will be attending Telematics Update and NetWorld+Interop), it seems that it is easier to spend the money and attend ESC than to pay the PR and customer relations price of not attending. Transportation was everywhere at ESC. Racecars, RVs, Hummers, battle bots, robots (they have wheels), etc.

Transportation/automotive continues to offer embedded vendors tremendous growth opportunities as formerly high-end safety and comfort features filter down though car lines. That coupled with car infotainment, telematics and networking showing signs of moving beyond the lab bench and becoming mainstream indicate a market that is both embracing (slowly) new technology and then making that new technology pervasive down through all but the lowest models. Automotive has a bright future, but not likely bright enough to carry the market over the decline in telecom.

VDC's ESC awards go to . . .

• Best of Show — Eternal Systems' Eternal Duration is a technology designed to manage the fail over of applications in the telecom, mil/aero, transportation and industrial automation markets. With the addition of as little as one simple line of code Eternal Duration can be linked into an application and provide fail over management, notification and other features. This is a product that is clearly superior to the traditional approach to offering application high availability on its head and at a substantial price break. Eternal Duration starts at $35,000 and supports MontaVista Carrier Grade Linux and Intel Pentium based Systems.
• Best Strategy Announcement — Those on the royalty free road have a new fellow traveler: NewMonics. The embedded Java company announced that their PERC J2SE class clean room VM will be available under a royalty free license. This move will better align the company with their type of relatively low volume, highly engineered application that they are achieving success in. Other benefits include the potential for new partner and channel relationships with royalty free/platform oriented OS and software suppliers. This is just a smart move by a company with a great product. If you are not familiar with NewMonics and PERC you should take a look. They are deployed in a number of telecom, industrial automation and other applications, and are involved in some of the most innovative Java projects.
• Best Show Swag — Not too much in the way of innovative giveaway items this year. The only thing I picked up was the ACE Associated Compiler Experts Hacky Sack. My daughter loved it.

Walking the Floor . . .

• QNX Software Systems is now offering better power management for automotive and other applications though it Neutrino RTOS. Two control methods are available including control over the power modes of the target CPU and a power manager which allows the system to be monitor and control the power used.
• I-Logix announced the immediate commercial availability of iNotion, its product lifecycle management (PLM) portal for software. The iNotion 2.0 platform adds support for complementary industry tools and provides personalization capabilities to allow product teams including marketing, systems and software engineering, test and quality assurance, and support to easily manage the volumes of material generated during a project. iNotion is a product with near limitless potential and applications and is appropriate for all types or organizations including embedded software vendors.
• Another platform from Wind River Systems is available, this time for Car Infotainment. Features include: VxWorks, protocols (CAN, MOST, USB 802.11), multimedia library, services, access to partner technology. Wind River also announced its Wind River Developer Network. It will include conferences, online presence for chats, technical information, etc.
• Expansion is underway at Green Hills Software. The company announced that they have opened six new sales offices in Atlanta, Dayton, Chicago, Phoenix, Seattle and Ottawa/Montreal. Also, Jack Douglas has joined the company as vice chairman. Jack will bring extensive public company experience to GHS and will be tasked with developing the infrastructure to support a future IPO. Chris Smith has been promoted to VP of Marketing.
• MontaVista announced 5 new partner agreements including IBM Websphere. Adding Java to their line up will help them penetrate the consumer market among others. The yellow robot built on their Linux distribution was very popular at the show.
• Version 4.2 of Microsoft's Windows CE has been released. Improvements include Windows Media 9 Series codecs and digital rights management Version 7.1.
• LynuxWorks introduced the Lynx Certifiable Stack (LCS), the industry's first DO-178B Level A-certified standalone TCP/IP stack for safety- and security-critical environments. LCS allows any developer of safety critical devices the ability to leverage a commercial off-the-shelf stack that is certifiable to Level A.
• RTI announced support for the new Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS) specification that has been recommended for adoption to the OMG DDS.
• ACE Associated Compiler Experts are now supporting C++ with their CoSy compiler generation system. Over 40 customers are using CoSy to build compilers quickly and easily. Other advancements include software pipelining and code generator improvements resulting in performance gains of 15-38%.
• Altuim Ltd. unveiled its new Board on Chip technology. This new technology will enable developers to design and implement complete systems including processor cores and software right on FPGAs. BoC technology lets you build a system that includes one or more cores, memory, peripheral and software and the put the who virtual board onto an FPGA.
• Mentor Graphics/ATI has built their own Ipv6 and SNMP3 stacks to complement their royalty free OS, Nucleolus Plus. In addition, MG/ATI will be the North American liaison office for TRON Association. They will be charged with growing the use of TRON.

Copyright © 2003, Venture Development Corp. (VDC). All rights reserved. Reproduced by LinuxDevices.com with permission.

 
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