1. Wind River extends Virtualisation Support with new release of Wind River Hypervisor
2. Interface Concept: 3U Front End Processing with VPX
3. Kontron XMC401: Highest data throughput on two 10Gbit Ethernet interfaces
4. Interface Concept IC-GRA-XMCa: AMD/ATI M54 XMC Graphics board
5. AdaCore Launches CodePeer Tool
6. Training: An Introduction to COTS & Embedded Systems

ALAMEDA, Calif., January 5, 2010 — Wind River today announced the immediate availability of VxWorks version 6.8, the embedded industry’s leading real-time operating system (RTOS). Wind River’s continued investment in VxWorks has delivered improvements in multicore support and fundamental operating system features, decreasing time-to-market while lowering costs and improving quality for device manufacturers.

VxWorks is a proven, high-performance, reliable, commercial-grade real-time operating system addressing the diverse needs of embedded systems. VxWorks 6.8 provides product differentiation via increased performance, a smaller footprint and hardware platform flexibility. Wind River’s newest version of VxWorks also provides choice in multicore architecture allowing customers to select the right solution for their needs. Improved OS primitives, USB support and file system performance with VxWorks 6.8 provide customers with increased product quality, more compatibility and improved product performance.

“Wind River’s continued investment in VxWorks is providing the market with a proven and trusted solution for embedded systems including multicore devices. With each release of VxWorks, Wind River continues to improve performance and broaden hardware support to enable the next generation of devices,” said Marc Brown, vice president, marketing and strategy, VxWorks Product Division, Wind River. “VxWorks 6.8 also demonstrates Wind River’s commitment to delivering a comprehensive solution for embedded systems.”

Additional key features and benefits of VxWorks 6.8 include:

* A standards-compliant solution and comprehensive mobile IP support to provide devices with next-generation networking capabilities for 4G and pre-4G including LTE and WiMAX technologies;
* Increased multicore processor support for Intel® Core™ i7 processor, ARM MPCore and Cortex A9; Freescale QorIQ P2020; Cavium 54xx, 55xx, 56xx, 57xx, 58xx; and RMI XLR, XLS allowing customers to choose the processor that best fits their needs;
* Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) performance improvements and SMP core reservation;
* Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) enhancements such as AMP spin locks, and a major upgrade to Wind River’s multi-OS inter-process communication with MIPC version 2.0, raising the bar for multicore capabilities with even higher performance thresholds;
* New small ARM footprint profile for creating embedded applications with very small memory requirements; and
* Significant developer tool productivity improvements, including VxWorks core dump file and analysis, and improvements to multicore and multi-OS debugging and user workflows.

Availability
VxWorks 6.8, available as part of VxWorks Edition 3.8, is immediately available to customers worldwide. Additional details about VxWorks 6.8 can be found at http://www.windriver.com/announces/vxworks6.8/.

SUNNYVALE, CA-November 17, 2009-Real-Time Innovations (RTI), The Real-Time Middleware Experts, announced today that NASA is using RTI middleware to control a fleet of experimental robots. The NASA Human-Robotic Systems Project is developing four prototype robots at four major research centers. The robots share a network data architecture that uses RTI middleware.

The Lunar Electric Rover crosses the Arizona desert during the 2009 Desert Research and Technology Studies (RATS) field test in September.

The Human-Robotic Systems Project includes four robots with four very different missions. NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., is building a robot called K10. Because it carries an array of cameras and laser scanners, this robot can operate in an unstructured environment by itself or with human oversight. ATHLETE, a large, six-limbed robot built at the Jet Propulsion Lab, is designed to transport large payloads across a wide range of terrain, including steep slopes and rocks. Johnson Space Center has built a Lunar Electric Rover-or LER-that could transport astronauts across long distances on the moon or Mars someday. Finally, Langley Research Center is building a crane-like robot called the Lunar Surface Manipulator System (LSMS) to help with assembly and loading missions on planetary surfaces.

These systems are prototypes for vehicles that will someday operate on extraterrestrial surfaces. Today, the prototypes are being tested in harsh analogue environments. For instance, during the summer, K10, ATHLETE and the LER spent weeks at Black Point Lava Flow in Northern Arizona.

The K10 robot scouted Black Point Lava Flow (Arizona) in June 2009. A science team remotely operated K10 from NASA Ames in California.

Terry Fong, director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames, said, “Although ATHLETE, K10, and LER have very different designs and are used for different missions, they share common needs. For example, all of these robots will sometimes be “teleoperated” with direct joystick control. This requires high-speed communications with the operator. At other times, these robots will be operated with long transmission delays over low-bandwidth communication links. In addition, each system must integrate many other applications, including sensors, graphical interfaces and navigation. The robots also run a variety of operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS, VxWorks and Windows.”

All the NASA robots are designed to share a common data communications interface. This saves significant deployment costs, reduces training requirements and leverages code and experience between the centers. Someday, when NASA launches the systems, having only one communications architecture will eliminate the need for duplicate testing, simplify operator equipment and reduce ground staffing.

The ATHLETE robot is shown operating at Black Point Lava Flow. ATHLETE has six independent, wheeled legs that allow it to drive and walk across rough terrain.

Fong continued, “Getting four complex robots with very different designs to use a common data system was challenging. The Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems [DDS] standard supports very flexible service parameters. We found that we could adapt the middleware to the unique needs of each robotic system.”

Stan Schneider, CEO of RTI commented, “NASA Ames was our first middleware customer in the early 1990s. The advances in the NASA robotics program are striking; we are proud to be a part of it.”

About RTI Data Distribution Service

RTI Data Distribution Service provides a messaging and integration infrastructure for demanding, mission-critical distributed applications. It combines deterministic performance, low latency, high throughput and fault tolerance into a fast, scalable architecture for real-time systems. By enabling loosely coupled integration, the solution significantly reduces long-term software maintenance costs. Individual subsystems may be modified, added or upgraded without impacting existing software.

RTI Data Distribution Service complies with the Object Management Group (OMG) DDS, the leading standard for real-time application integration. RTI also natively supports the DDS Real-Time Publish-Subscribe (RTPS) wire protocol for peer-to-peer interoperability with other RTPS-compliant DDS implementations. RTI is the world’s leading supplier of DDS-related software and services.

1. Free Seminar: A Discussion of Multicore and Virtualisation in embedded systems
     Monday, 30th November 2009 - Technology Park, Mawson Lakes, South Australia
2. Single or Dual MPC8640 VME SBC with up to 8 GbE Ports, Embedded L2 GbE switch and Virtex 5 FPGA
3. Xilinx Virtex-5 3U VPX board with FMC site
4. Schroff’s new 1U MicroTCA Chassis for 6 single size AMC Modules
5. Kontron XMC-ETH2: Robust dual Gigabit Ethernet mezzanine board with long-term availability
6. RTI Eases Scaling and Integration of Real-Time Systems Across WANs and Systems of Systems
7. Software warranties - A new era?
8. AdaCore Introduces Enhanced Version of GNAT Programming Studio

This will be a great opportunity to discuss, how the influx of multicore processors will impact your existing and future embedded designs.

Participants will also learn about symmetric and asymmetric multiprocessing, virtualisation and partitioning techniques focused on multicore embedded devices.

Details about agenda, the topics discussed and the speaker can be found here.

1. Kontron brings Intel Atom record breaking performance per watt into CompactPCI systems
2. USB Avionics Adapters-MIL STD 1553, ARINC 429 and ARINC 717
3. VPX Development Tools from ELMA
4. Now shipping: Kontron Pico-ITX embedded Single Board Computer with Intel Atom processors
5. PowerPC 8641 Processor XMC / PMC Board with 4GB of Flash
6. Interface Concept selects Dedicated Systems Australia as Distributor
7. VME and CPCI Gig & 10 Gig Ethernet Switch-24x 1Gbit and up to 4x 10GBit ports at full wire speed

Read more…..

Eching, Germany, September 15, 2009 - Kontron is bringing record-breaking performance per watt to 3U CompactPCI® systems with the launch of the longtime available processor board Kontron CP305 with Intel® Atom^TM processor. The rugged Kontron CP305 features EN50155 compliant reliability and extremely low TDP (Thermal Design Power), soldered processor, chipset and RAM for harsh environments.

 Equipped with the 1.6 GHz Intel® Atom^TM processor N270, Intel® 945GSE plus ICH7M chipset and up to 2 GByte of soldered DDR2 memory the Kontron CP305 has a typical power consumption of only 10 Watt. This is less than half compared to earlier generations with identical performance. Designed for reliable operation in a temperature range from 0 to 60°C for convection cooled environments, the new CompactPCI® board powers energy critical and in-vehicle mobile embedded applications in the transportation, automation, energy, military and aerospace markets. A version for the extended temperature range is also planned.

 Despite its rugged low-power design, Kontron’s latest CompactPCI® CPU-board offers a comprehensive set of interfaces: On board the Kontron CP305 are 2 x Gbit Ethernet, up to 6 x USB 2.0, two SATA interfaces, and a CompactFlash socket. The graphics accelerator, integrated into the Mobile Intel 945GSE Express chipset, provides excellent 2D, 3D, and video features for the VGA connector on the front. The 3U CompactPCI® CPU board is available as single slot (4HP) or dual slot (8HP). Engineers profit from the 8HP version by additional features including COM, PS/2, DVI on the front for dual monitor operation and a 2.5″ SATA hard disk interface to mount a HDD or SSD required for harsher environments.

 The Kontron CP305 features integrated board support packages for Linux, Microsoft Windows XP, XP embedded and VxWorks. Samples of the Kontron CP305 3U CompactPCI® processor board are available now. Full production is scheduled for end of 2009.

 More on the Kontron CP305 CompactPCI® CPU board:  
http://www.dedicatedsystems.com.au/hardware/compact-pci-picmg216/single-board-computers/3u-pentium-based-compactpci-sbcs/

• Wind River named Leading Embedded Linux Vendor by VDC Research Group
• Fully-managed 10 GigE Switches provide IP Carrier Class Routing on 6U CompactPCI, VME and VPX platforms
• multipacPRO-19″ Chassis from Schroff in 1U to 5U heights 
• PCI Express Avionics Interfaces - MIL-STD-1553, Discrete I/O, IRIG
• AdaCore Expands GNAT Pro Offerings to all current VxWorks Platforms
• Compact MicroTCA system houses up to six AdvancedMC modules
• Kontron CP307-RS for high storage demands

We most associate hypervisors and virtualization with servers from their beginnings as tools for development and testing, through their widespread adoption as a means to reduce the number of physical servers needed, to their current stage as a foundation for dynamic IT architectures. Virtualization on the client side has been more of a niche although application virtualization continues to grow in importance and some specific uses, such as running Windows applications on Macs, have proven quite popular.

As for embedded devices, special-purpose computers, virtualization has had essentially no impact.

That’s beginning to change. Wind River, one of the major players in embedded operating systems and recently purchased by Intel, today announced the availability of Wind River Hypervisor. From the press release:

Wind River Hypervisor enables virtualization for devices across a broad range of market segments, including aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer devices, industrial, and networking. Within these markets, embedded developers are adopting hypervisors to enable the replacement of multiple boards or CPUs with a single board and/or a single CPU, create innovative new devices that leverage multiple operating systems, and reduce complexity when integrating multicore processors. The benefits of using the Wind River Hypervisor include reduced hardware costs and power consumption, opportunity for innovation, and accelerated time-to-market.

This hypervisor can be employed in a number of different ways on a multicore processor. For example, it can be used to run multiple operating system (OS) and application instances on a single processor as a way of enabling single-threaded applications to access multicore performance.

However, what’s probably the most interesting use case is consolidating different operating systems on a single processor–and thereby potentially reducing the otherwise need for separate chips or devices. This hypervisor targets two primary operating systems: Wind River’s VxWorks and Wind River Linux. To understand why mixing these two might be interesting and useful, consider the differences between them.

VxWorks is Wind River’s proprietary “hard real-time” operating system. It’s widely used in places like aerospace and defense (think radar, avionics, and so forth) and the data processing of network gear.

Real-time, in general, refers to operating systems and software that have a very predictable response time to events. Predictability runs in opposition to overall throughput so commercial operating systems have historically not been real-time operating systems. Hard real-time typically refers to the need to have truly guaranteed response with the possibility of failure or damage if a response is not made in time.

Wind River Linux is the company’s version of Linux optimized for embedded devices. In 2007, Wind River acquired FSMLabs, a real-time Linux vendor, to augment its Linux efforts. Wind River had earlier had a partnership with Red Hat, now discontinued.

Without going into all the gory details of schedulers and so forth, suffice it to say that the real-time characteristics of Linux have improved considerably over the years. Furthermore, various patches can further optimize Linux for real-time uses. Today, we see Linux in applications (such as this IBM/Raytheon deployment) that would have historically been well outside the realm of even customized general-purpose software.

That said, an operating system like VxWorks retains a specialized focus on real-time and comes in versions that carry stringent certifications. Thus, there are many situations where it may make sense to use VxWorks for those parts of an application that require those certifications or are otherwise better served by the specialized real-time OS. At the same time, Linux may be a better fit for other parts of the application that can leverage the Linux ecosystem for components such as user interfaces.

In addition to having different technical requirements, embedded systems make for a somewhat different virtualization use case than in enterprise IT. In embedded, operating systems remain far more specialized and bespoke and this makes the ability to mix and match them on increasingly powerful and multicore processors very useful. This is another face of increasingly pervasive virtualization.