Special Report on Windows & Real-Time

Windows NT & Real-Time Extensions
Windows CE

It was through our consultancy activities that we first saw the need for using Microsoft Windows technology in real-time systems. This was later confirmed by the results of our RTOS market survey which concluded that a significant percentage of users are interested in using Microsoft based Operating Systems. 

There are several reasons for this:

• The Win32 API becomes a de facto standard and a great amount of software is available for it.
• If the available software is of no use for the application, one can rely on a large number of software engineers who are familiar with the Win32 API.
• The graphical user interface is so popular that only a few (1?) competitors are left now.
• NT has a lot of ready to go solutions for communication issues (both hardware and software), especially in a PCI environment.
• All kinds of development tools are available for the Windows NT environment, and it is convenient to have the same environment for both business and industrial applications.
• Industrial systems are now seamlessly integrated with the business systems. By using Microsoft OS technology, the integration and communication between these two worlds is easy.

All these reasons lead people to experiment with the Microsoft Windows OS for dedicated systems. The importance of the dedicated systems market has been acknowledged by Microsoft through the introduction of Windows CE. Although Windows NT and CE are not yet true RTOSs, some embedded applications with low real-time constraints are using them already. Moreover, hard real-time applications can be addressed by using Real-Time extensions for NT, which are now being made available by different vendors, and by the availability of CE 3.0 later this year.

Windows NT & Real-Time Extensions
Windows CE