Wind River will buy Tilcon Software, a vendor of Linux-compatible, embedded GUI (graphical user interface) toolkits targeting industrial, defense, medical, automotive, and mobile devices. Alameda, Calif.-based Wind River will pay $3.5 million for Tilcon, of Ottawa, Canada, in a deal set to close Feb. 27.

(Click for palette of GUIs developed with Tilcon's IDS)

The private-held, 18-employee Tilcon recently announced a version of its GUI toolkit designed to work with Wind River Linux and VxWorks. Tilcon's Interface Development Suite (IDS) 5.5.5 for Wind River features a drag-and-drop interface builder, property sheets for customizing appearance, behavior, resources, and actions, and a “wide” range of GUI and HMI objects, the company says. There is also a GIS application development module and Rhapsody UML (unified modeling language) support.

According to Wind River, the Tilcon software will be applied to both its OS platforms “across multiple device types and target vertical markets.” Wind River specifically mentions environments in which programmable graphics are replacing or augmenting analog gauges and dials. Tilcon's IDS requires little or no coding, says the company.

Tilcon IDS screen displays

IDS is based on the Tilcon Embedded Vector Engine (EVE), pictured at the bottom of the above diagram. EVE manages display and user interaction events as a service to distributed API clients. Working directly with native RTOSes such as Linux, EVE interacts with core graphics libraries, including WindML, Win32, Photon, and OpenGL ES.

Stated Ken Klein, CEO at Wind River, “Wind River's acquisition of Tilcon will differentiate and expand our VxWorks and Linux platforms value proposition across many device classes, with the initial focus on vertical markets with immediate graphics opportunity such as industrial and medical applications.”

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.