On Target: Embedded Systems

PERC Pico Announced, Could 2006 be the Year of Real-Time Java?

Aonix release of PERC Pico.

Our notes on the release:

• PERC Pico is has smaller foot print and is faster than Aonix PERC, a full Java SE class VM
• PERC Pico does sacrifice some library support to achieve if size and performance capabilities
• Retains key Java advantages of code portability, modularity and reuse - as well as the large # of developers who know Java.
• Minimal footprint is about 128K
• C/C++ like performance can be achieved
• Latency is about 2-3 microseconds
• Utilizes t he RTSJ profile, but is not a full RTSJ implementation.
• Can be used with No RTOS (bare metal), with PERC for full Java SE support, or with an RTOS

VDC's View: PERC Pico is a sign that the future of real-time, mission/safety-critical Java might just be bright. Previous attempts at real-time Java were unable to manage the footprint and performance issues that restrict its use in many hard real-time applications. To overcome these issues, the team at Aonix has come at these problems from the point of view of the developers who will use the technology and identified the most important features. PERC Pico does sacrifice some aspects of Java, but retains enough of the advantages to be appealing to developers. VDC expects that PERC Pico will be the basis for future standards from the JCP and this will certainly help adoption.

Release:

Aonix®, the provider of the PERC® real-time virtual machine for embedded targets, has made available a pre-commercial “proof of concept” release of its new PERC Pico™ technology. PERC Pico is the first development environment for Java developers geared toward the creation of resource-constrained and deeply embedded hard real-time applications. PERC Pico is already being evaluated for use in a broad range of projects including: avionics, satellites, deep space probes, radio communications, weapons systems, and flight surface controls.

PERC Pico offers the advantages of Java™ development with footprint and execution performance comparable to C/C++ programs. PERC Pico makes it possible to create very small, fast programs with tight timing requirements using Java source code. The Eclipse-based PERC Pico environment combines off-the-shelf tools with standards-based annotations, a verifier, and automated build tools to create efficient executables and dynamically loadable class files. The built-in memory management removes the complexities and execution inefficiencies typically associated with conventional garbage-collection techniques that are not as suitable for resource-constrained applications.

“For years, the promise of a hard real-time solution for Java developers targeting deeply embedded or resource constrained applications has been mostly unfulfilled,” said Dave Wood, PERC Product Manager. “PERC has been the leading VM solution for complex, soft real-time applications for nearly a decade, and now PERC Pico will fill the void for the hard real-time needs typical in mission- and safety-critical applications.”

PERC Pico can be used in either a stand-alone configuration on bare target boards where footprint and execution speed are at a premium or in combination with the full PERC virtual machine in an RTOS environment. An RTOS-based configuration is ideal for complex embedded applications where developers need to combine high levels of functionality with access to low-level devices. The PERC virtual machine offers rich J2SE™-based capabilities and predictable garbage collection, while PERC Pico provides the low-level access and small latencies that are often required.

“Availability of the PERC Pico technologies is critical to fulfilling the Java Community Process requirement to establish a safety-critical Java standard”, noted Kelvin Nilsen, Aonix CTO. PERC Pico is designed as a profile of the RTSJ™ specification. Aonix, already active with the Open Group and the Java™ Community Process in working toward safety critical profile standardization, has volunteered to make this technology available as the basis for the official reference implementation.

PERC Pico is available now in limited pre-release form for qualified customers interested in evaluation of the technology. The commercial release of PERC Pico is scheduled for delivery in the second half of 2006.

LynuxWorks 2006 Vision Summit

VDC attended the LynuxWorks “Vision Summit” in San Jose, CA this week along with a number of other analysts and press representatives in attendance. The session included a series of presentations that focused on the company’s positioning of their RTOS and tools products with a focus on satisfying open system, safety, and security requirements. In addition, the session served as an event to introduce new additions to the LynuxWorks Team, including Robert Day, Joe Wlad, and Steve Blackman.

VDC’s conclusions from the summit meeting:

LynuxWorks is one of the traditional RTOS companies in the embedded software market. They have long held a position within this market of supporting a dual approach for their operating system solutions – LynxOS and BlueCat Linux – offering a platform choice to OEMs.

From VDC’s perspective, this private company’s revenue has been stable over the last several years that have most likely contributed to the lack of investment in rebuilding the organization and marketing programs. The summit comes on the heels of a LynuxWorks press release in December 2005 that discussed the strength of their most recent quarterly results, optimism going forward, and additional financing from current investors. To be clear, the additional employees are seasoned veterans within the embedded software market. These additions demonstrate the company’s commitment to a more aggressive marketing and product campaign that focuses on their key strengths and differentiators for their products – adherence to open standards, consistent Eclipse-based software development tools, safety-critical/high reliability, and security/information assurance (for medium EAL 4+ and high EAL 6+), and software reuse/portability.

2005 has apparently been a very good year for the company. The selection by General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems group in April for the U.S Army’s Future Combat System (FCS) was a key win. There were most likely significant resources dedicated to making this win possible and countless more to ensure its continued success. While such a resource commitment might suggest a strategic shift in focus for the company in the short-term in key target industries, we expect that the company is betting on the increasing awareness across all industries to develop products more efficiently, with higher reliability, and software portability, while providing some level of information assurance.

Bottom line:

The company’s success in 2005 and optimism for the future has allowed them to invest in their marketing programs, organizational structure, and product R&D. All these together should position LynuxWorks to capitalize on their momentum going into 2006. What remains then is the hard part: executing against the strategy and realizing the returns on those investments.

FSMLabs and the WIN-T Program

While JTRS gets all the press and the problems, the WIN-T program keeps moving forward. FSMLabs has a couple of wins with Harris and BBN for its RTLinux product on the WIN-T program.

News Round Up with Comments

Here are some of the more important news items of the last couple of days:

Green Hills Software, Inc., the leader in real-time operating systems (RTOS) and device software optimization (DSO), today announced the immediate availability of its entire DSO product line for Xilinx Virtex™-4 Platform FPGAs, including the INTEGRITY real-time operating system (RTOS), PowerPC compilers, TimeMachine debugger, MULTI integrated development environment (IDE), Green Hills probe, and SuperTrace probe. While each product is a leader in its space, together they form an optimized and highly integrated DSO solution that enables Virtex-4 system developers to create the highest performing and most reliable product in the least amount of time and at the lowest cost for solutions in the networking, medical, automotive, avionics, defense and industrial control markets.

VDC's View: Note the use of DSO in the beginning of this announcement. For those of you who thought this DSO thing was dead, guess again. None of the DSOers has given up yet. Wind, Enea and Green Hills look like they will stick with DSO for the foreseeable future. The subtitle of this release is: Immediate Availability of Leading Hardware and Software Solution for Software Defined Radio (SDR). The current JTRS programs are in some trouble with respect to being able to meet their technology and delivery promises. The future is, of course, SDR based but the current attempts at implementation may not be the ones that take us into that future.

Micriµm announces the release of µC/USB-MSD (V1.00)

The µC/USB-MSD stack enables you to use your embedded target device as a USB mass storage device. You can simply connect your product to a Windows-based PC.

VDC's View: MicroC OS? Why is that important? Because MicroC is everywhere even if you don't know it. Always good to keep an eye on what Micrium is up to.

IBM Launches New Software to Help Organizations Automate Governance

IBM...launched new software designed to help systems engineers manage their development environment and more easily comply with industry-specific regulations.

Built on Eclipse, IBM Rational Systems Developer helps organizations trace industry-specific regulatory requirements from design to implementation. With its support for the Rational software portfolio, Rational Systems Developer enables engineers to manage their software development process more comprehensively and integrate compliance mandates into the process automatically.

For example, in the defense space, Rational Systems Developer helps systems engineers comply with mandatory defense systems requirements -- the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) -- by providing standardized views and reports on the system architecture. Rational Systems Developer is also able to create a visual model of a system's software design and can automatically generate code from the design, thereby saving time and increasing accuracy in future projects. Other compliance and standards initiatives primed to take advantage of Rational Systems Developer include AUTOSAR, DoD5000 and Navy Open Architecture certification and accreditation processes.

VDC's View: IBM's competitors have already staked a claim to the DoDAF market and indeed other industry specific frameworks as well. Telelogic acquired Popkin in 2005 and I-Logix released the award-winning Rhapsody 6.1 in 2005 as well. Cleary IBM needed to address these challenges. Although IBM is by far the leading vendor of modeling tools in the embedded market, questions still remain about the company's commitment and long term plans.