On Target: Embedded Systems

Concurrent Posts Loss - Bullish on SW Business

Concurrent has been emphasizing is software offerings recently:

• Reseller dealer withNovell to jointly sell and support Concurrent Real-Time Extensions Powered By SUSE Linux, a specialized Linux offering based on Novell's popular SUSE Linux operating system. (Jan 2006)
• Nighthawk development tools released to merchant market (Nov 2005)
• Several design wins for RedHawk RT Linux (2005/2006)

On software in the Q2 06 release:

Additionally, we achieved higher overall gross margins partly due to our continued evolution to a software company. These operating results combined with the anticipated growth of both the video-on-demand business and our real-time operating system business indicate improving results in calendar 2006. Our enthusiasm is due to the huge growth in content availability for VOD, the success of near network DVR applications like "Start Over," and our recent announcement of a partnership with Novell to sell our real-time Linux operating system on the SUSE Linux release. Our real-time Linux operating system continues to gain momentum as the best high performance operating system in the market. We anticipate growing revenues in the coming quarters which, coupled with sound fundamentals, should tend toward positive results."

The financial info is below


ATLANTA, Georgia, January 27, 2006 - Concurrent (Nasdaq: CCUR), a worldwide leader of on-demand and real-time computing technology, today announced its results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2006.

In the second quarter of fiscal 2006, consolidated revenue for the company aggregated $18.9 million compared to $16.2 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2006, an increase of 16.3%. Revenue from Concurrent's on-demand product line totaled $9.8 million for the second quarter of fiscal 2006 compared to $7.3 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2006, an increase of 33.7%. Revenue from the company's real-time product line totaled $9.1 million for the second quarter of fiscal 2006 compared to $8.9 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2006, an increase of 2.1%. Cash at the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2006 totaled $17.0 million, a decrease of $0.4 million from the prior quarter.

The net loss for the second quarter of fiscal 2006 was $1.6 million, or a loss of $0.02 per fully diluted share, compared to a net loss of $2.2 million, or a loss of $0.03 per fully diluted share, in the first quarter of fiscal 2006.

FSMLabs adds ARINC Support

Does FSMLabs have the most complete Embedded Linux solution package for a company that is not a household/industry name? Wind River and MontaVista get most of the press (here too!), but FSMLabs continues to innovate and expand its offerings. The release has a full list.

We would not count on this product in safety critical apps. FSMLabs has had a great deal of success in test bench applications for the aerospace market. This appears to support those efforts.

FSMLabs has the product line, but lacks the market presence and awareness that other companies have invested in with venture-backed capital. We believe the company has largely bootstrapped itself over the years and while this conservative approach has a number of benefits, it is difficult to achieve the market presence of a MontaVista that way. That said, the problems that MontaVista appears to have are only compounded by investors with high-return expectations. Maybe the folks in Socorro have a better plan?

The release is here:

Socorro, NM - January 23, 2006 - FSMLabs today announced ARINC 653 scheduling is now available in RTLinuxPro. Designed for avionics control and advanced hardware-in-loop simulation, ARINC 653 provides a fully protected and partitioned scheduling environment configured using a standard XML format. The ARINC scheduler has been added to FSMLabs' industry leading PSDD user space real-time product for executing real-time threads in the address space of Linux or BSD processes.

Richard Bond, who developed an RTLinuxPro based simulator in his work as Principal Real-Time Specialist for Lockheed-Martin, says:
"RTLinuxPro and PSDD enabled a simple simulation framework, allowed me the choice to develop user-level I/O drivers, and provided outstanding performance. ARINC 653 support will make this tool even more useful.”

PSDD is especially well suited to large scale simulation and test applications.
Dean Anneser, a Software Engineering Fellow at Pratt & Whitney says:
"PSDD provides a very cost effective scalable multiplatform solution (x86/ppc) for our simulation, control, and data acquisition systems.”

The ARINC 653 specification requires both time and space (memory) partitioning and also calls for XML scheduling configuration. FSMLabs has coupled these standard configuration, scheduling and protection mechanisms with RTCore's POSIX compliant OS interface. ARINC users get the benefits of specific scheduling windows, easy configuration, and application isolation, plus POSIX threads, semaphores, shared memory and other standard interfaces. The system supports, “C,” C++, and FORTRAN. ADA support is planned.

Modern off the shelf processors can perform at many times the capacity of previous generation special purpose systems so ARINC 653 “cabinets” can share processors or multiprocessors with standard PSDD and RTCore real-time threads and ordinary Linux processes. For example, databases and graphical visualization systems can run in left-over time.

RTCore's built-in SMP support is inherited by the ARINC 653 subsystem. Multiple ARINC “cabinets” can be run on a single system, reducing management overhead, cost, space, and power requirements. Where the computing requirements of the ARINC partitions is exceptionally high, RTLinux's processor control and reservation technology allows system architects the option of running only real-time code on selected processors.

The PSDD component already supported time and space partitioning, but FSMLabs has now added an option to PSDD for ARINC 653 required limitations on interaction between partitions. The FSMLabs implementation provides user-defined timing windows for specific partitions enabling users to create multi-threaded simulation compartments that are bound to specific periods of time within a cycle. Threads within a partition are dependent on their priority level within that compartment and are completely independent of other ARINC threads at any other priorities that may run during other time-slices.

FSMLabs'ARINC 653 support comes as an option to the RTLinuxPro development kit, which provides all of the tools needed to build hard real-time applications out of the box, including:

• A full set of compilers, libraries, and build tools, plus debugger
• The RTCore real-time server and a ruggedized embedded Linux kernel
• An Eclipse based IDE
• A small embedded target file system
• Carrier Grade Linux as an option
• Full FSMLabs state-of-the-art testing and quality assurance

Availability:
RTLinuxPro and ARINC 653 support are available immediately from FSMLabs and its worldwide channel partners. For a complete list of supported hardware, contact FSMLabs.

 

Cyclades(?) acquired by Avocent

What does a console and KVM acquisition story have to do with embedded software? Other than the products containing embedded software, not much it would seem. However, Cyclades was an early and outspoken supporter of embedded Linux. Cyclades was also an early MontaVista customer.

The company has even put a Penguin/Linux logo on its products.

Mentor Q4 Results - ATI Highlights

Mentor Graphics finished 2005 on high note, posting record revenue of $221.3 million for Q4.

During the corporate presentation the Embedded Systems Division (ATI) was mentioned twice:

1. The operations in Mobile were disrupted by the hurricanes that hit the Gulf States.
2. Embedded systems customer count more than tripled in Q4.

Not much here, but encouraging news for a strong industry close for 2005.

Arrow, LynuxWorks, RTI, Motorola, Intel and Dot21 Partner on OA

This announcement came out yesterday from Arrow.

Arrow Electronics Partners with Technology Suppliers to Deliver Open Architecture Solution to U.S. Armed Services

ENGLEWOOD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)----Arrow OEM Computing Solutions, the division of the North American Components (NAC) group of Arrow Electronics, Inc. ( ARW) that provides design engineering, manufacturing, system integration, supply chain management and post-manufacturing services to industrial OEMs and intellectual property-based companies, today announced it has partnered with Dot21, Intel, LynuxWorks, Motorola and RTI to deliver a new open architecture solution to the U.S. Armed Services.

The bundled hardware and software solution, called "OA Out of the Box," will offer the military and other government agencies a standard platform for developing open architecture-based solutions. This platform can serve as the foundation for any type of OA application and will enable designers to speed time to market and prevent them from having to conduct a complete re-design each time they begin a new development.

To create the solution, Intel and Motorola are contributing COTS-based (commercial off the shelf) open hardware components, such as computer blades, in a multitude of physical and mechanical configurations; RTI is providing the readily accepted middleware that enables different technologies to communicate; LynuxWorks is providing a POSIX-based open operating system; and Dot 21 is conducting performance testing. By relying on open architecture in systems such as the Navy's Ship Self Defense System and the Army's Future Combat Systems, the military is able to reduce costs, quickly deploy new solutions and facilitate the rapid exchange of information between soldiers, weapons, sensors and command platforms.

"As a distributor and integration partner, Arrow is in a unique position to bring together the offerings of its top suppliers to create comprehensive solutions such as 'OA Out of the Box,'" said Steve Ramsland, vice president and general manager, Arrow OEM Computing Solutions. "What's more, Arrow is bringing its logistics and integration expertise to the 'OA Out of the Box' solution, inventorying and ensuring the quality of each component and protecting against obsolescence by managing the supply chain."

 

Telelogic Q4 Results

Highlights (VDC comments in parentheses):

• Revenue $51 Million (converted using Q4 average exchange rate)
• Tau (UML tool) 18% of Revenues or $9.2 Million ($7.2M in Q4 2004)
• Tau G2 sales increased by 17%, G1 sales declined (to be expected)
• DOORS 44%, Synergy 23%
• System Architect 11% (acquired through Popkin acquisition cost $45M)
• Focal Point 4% (decision making application for product development)
• Earnings per share up 12%

VDC's View: This is a very solid quarter for Telelogic. We focus most of our efforts on Tau and the company's design automation tools, which are showing strength here - up $2M compared to Q4 2004. Most interesting in this announcement is the number of customers mentioned who are licensing multiple Telelogic products in multi-year agreements. Not only does this give a strong indication of future growth, but also shows the success of the company's acquisition strategy around DOORS and Synergy, although DOORS is the more successful product by far.

Sounds like DA Davidson Thinks WIND will hit its number

DA Davidson initiated coverage on Wind River today with a BUY. Remember Wind's fiscal year end is January. Seems like they have good feeling on this.

Say what you want about DSO but a number of analysts have initiated coverage on WIND in the past couple of months. Where were they when WIND was just in the "embedded" business?
Equity analysts who have started covering WIND since October 2005:

DA Davidson
AG Edwards
WR Hambrecht
Soleil
Citigroup
Prudential

RTI Offers Small Footprint NDDS Middleware

Although most of the success for the Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware standard and RTI's NDDS product have been in the military/aerospace market it seems they are finding acceptance in a number of other markets as well, including industrial automation. The company has a number of customers in the IA market including:

Schneider Electric
Schilling Robotics
Max Planck Institute
Nikon

RTI was previously famous for its scope tools line which it sold to Wind River in order to focus on its NDDS middleware product.

From the release:

In an iterative and collaborative development effort with an industrial automation giant, the networking experts at Real-Time Innovations (RTI) have created a modified version of RTI's NDDS real-time publish-subscribe communication middleware that can be used in low-cost, memory-constrained applications.

This new implementation of NDDS, which requires less than 100 kilobytes of memory, is currently deployed in a line of programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Because the standard version of NDDS can be used in high-end PLCs, developers can now deploy a common communication scheme across industrial control networks that contains a full range of PLC cost and functionality options

Standard RTI NDDS Developer Package is immediately available starting at$46,920 USD for a three-user perpetual license. Packages include NDDS middleware, NDDS tools and one year of support.

 

Stallman in eWeek

You can get a more serious look at GPL 3 from a number of sources including Linux Devices.

Here are some of the more entertaining parts of Richard Stallman in eWeek on GPL 3:

eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli: You said the main issues for you were making the license more easily compatible with other free licenses, as well as DRM (Digital Rights Management) and the whole patent issue. Tell me your thoughts on these issues.

Richard Stallman: DRM is an attempt to crush the freedom that copyright law gives the public. It is completely evil. DRM does not deserve to be tolerated and should be wiped out. It is tolerated because governments are not very democratic and the rich have too much power over governments and the media.

Another entry:

Galli: So, is the process now in the hands of the community?

Stallman: No. I will still be making decisions. The committees are going to take all the comments and boil them down to issues. Then they will start addressing the issues and looking at the various options. They will also try and decide how to deal with these issues, but ultimately I will be making those decisions. And, of course, if the community has found a good solution, they make that job easy.

One more:

Is Microsoft the greatest threat to freedom in software?

It is a mistake to think of the free software movement as an alternative to Microsoft. When we started this, Microsoft was not particularly important. In 1984, the system that people normally thought of as the system to compete with was Unix. That is why we have GNU's Not Unix: It couldn't be GNU's Not Windows because there was no Microsoft Windows then.

Microsoft is simply one example of a proprietary software developer, a software developer that tries to subjugate users to keep them divided and helpless. So what we are campaigning against, and trying to help people escape, is not any company in particular, but an antisocial system where software developers put restrictions on the users.

Worried about the state of US engineering?

Here is the session for at ESC San Jose:

Engineering Humanity Panel
Thursday, April 610:00am - 11:00am
Moderated by Brian Fuller, Editor-in-Chief, EE Times

It's under most Americans' radar, but technical education has become a silent crisis in America. The future of the nation's innovative culture is under stress as countries such as India and China graduate two to three times as many engineers. EE Times Editor-in-Chief Brian Fuller brings together a panel of educators and business leaders to frame the problem and offer solutions.

Seems like CMP editors are undecided about the situation. See Jim Turley's counterpoint here.