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.