By Bart Van Beneden, Project manager, Dedicated Systems Experts.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 6 
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By Dr. Andrew Coombes, Product Development Manager, Realogy.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 10 
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OSEK/VDX Debugging - Racing on to Becoming a Standard
Standards relating to the OS, COM, NM and OIL areas of the OSEK/VDX project have already been accepted and partly subject to several revisions. However, no standard currently exists for the testing and debugging of OSEK applications. In response to urgent requests from OSEK users, OSEK operating system manufacturers and the manufacturers of test tools for embedded applications have agreed on a method to be used for the testing and debugging of OSEK applications.

By Frank Büchner, SW Product Manager, Hitex Development Tools.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 13 
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Simple Multitasking Executive§
smx is a hard-real-time multitasking kernel for embedded systems. It offers many features to permit using slower processors and less memory, thus reducing product cost. This is becoming increasingly important as the embedded industry shifts to SoC solutions and more consumer-oriented products.

By Ralph Moore, President, Micro Digital.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 16 
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MiniRTL - Hard Real Time Linux for Embedded Systems
Embedded System development is moving away from single-task/user applications running on dedicated target platforms towards a reduced general purpose OS running on PC-like hardware. This move is well represented by Linux-based embedded projects and specialized minimum GNU/Linux distributions. Especially in the area of embedded systems the requirement of supporting hard real-time is emerging. As a sample system and a basis for development of hard real-time embedded systems MiniRTL was developed at the University of Vienna and is now continued at FSMLabs New Mexico. A system that is designed around four major tenets:

• bootable of a small media (floppy or flash)
• hard-real time capabilities, based on FSMLabs' current RTLinux development
• maximum compatibility to a "standard" desktop development system running an up-to-date kernel
• high security standard especially in the networking area.

By Nicholas Mc Guire, FSMLabs.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 28 
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By Ming-Yuan Zhu, Lei Luo and Guang-Ze Xiong, CoreTek Systems, Inc.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 38 
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Support for High Availability Applications in New-Generation RTOS’s
High availability applications are those that must be robust with respect to expected and unexpected failure events. They are based on aggressive error detection and error handling, as well as redundant hardware and software. Operating systems for these kinds of applications must provide unique infrastructure to support these specialized system designs. This article will survey some prominent special features of real-time operating systems to support high availability applications.

By David Kalinsky, Ph. D., Enea OSE Systems, Inc.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 47 
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By Limor Shmerling, WinDriver KernelDriver product manager, Jungo Software Technologies.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 52 
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By Punit Kalra, Xilinx and Stuart Newton, Wind River.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 54 
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Meeting the bandwidth challenge: Building Scalable Networking Equipment Using SMP
In their efforts to build a comprehensive range of networking products, many equipment manufacturers have invested in an equally wide range of operating systems (OSs). The results are predictable: code can't be reused across products, engineers can't move quickly from one project to another, and the networking products themselves can't offer end-to-end consistency of software services and management tools - much to the customer's inconvenience.In this paper, we look at how a microkernel OS based on network-transparent IPC can address these issues by allowing applications to be coded once, then deployed across entire product lines. With this OS architecture, the same application can run on a single-processor device, be partitioned across networked processors, or run on an SMP system, all without recoding or relinking. The net effect: less development effort, reduced testing, greater product consistency, and higher return on investment.

By Paul N. Leroux, Technology Analyst, QNX Software Systems Ltd.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 57 
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Dr. Leon Tietz, Professor in Computer and Information Sciences, OnCore Systems.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 61 
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New Demands of Embedded Designs Require New Approach to Protection
In the post-PC era, the role of smart devices is expanding every day. These devices depend on access to the Internet to function, and as reliance on the Internet infrastructure increases, the standards of reliability and availability have never been more stringent. For such devices, society simply will not tolerate the low standards of dependability set by the PC. The success of such devices depends on a new design paradigm that considers reliability and availability in virtually every aspect of the devices' software and hardware content. In moving toward such a new paradigm for Wind River's new flagship real-time new operating system (RTOS) - VxWorks AE - we took extreme care to leverage over twelve years of code integrity inherent to the original RTOS, while adding new capabilities to make it high availability-enabled.

By Maarten Koning, Principle Technologist, and Gerry Kuhn, Manager, Wind River.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 67 
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By Alan Moore, Vice President f Product Strategy, ARTiSAN Software Tools, Inc.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 72 
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Accurate, High Resolution Absolute Timing on the PC Platform
After 16 years, The IBM® PC-AT compatible hardware platform is still alive and well. Today's PCs are plentiful, inexpensive and fast, with CPU clock rates now exceeding 1 GHz. However, the advances in real time operating system (RTOS) software timing capabilities have not necessarily kept pace with the hardware speed improvements. This article presents a design for an accurate, high resolution PC RTOS timing subsystem which takes full advantage of this extra CPU bandwidth to provide improved capabilities and services to real-time and embedded applications. By increasing the clock tick frequency and clock accumulator precision, the instantaneous and long term software clock errors can be reduced significantly. And the high speed clock allows tasks to be accurately scheduled in the absolute time domain with resolution that is improved by several orders of magnitude. EYRX® is a new PC RTOS from Eyring Corporation that incorporates these design concepts (see: http://www.eyrx.com). The timing performance improvements are impressive. For example; when running with a 200 kHz system clock tick frequency on a 500 MHz machine, this new timing subsystem allows Eyrx to 1.) provide a software clock with 5 microsecond resolution and accuracy that can be calibrated to within 32 microseconds per year, 2.) preemptively schedule 100,000 tasks per second with each task receiving a full two-tick timeslice, and 3.) awaken a sleeping task at a precise absolute time with a worst case delay of less than 15 microseconds. Data acquisition, process control, high speed networking, sequencers, robotic feedback loops and other time critical applications can all benefit from these improved operating system software timing capabilities.

By Jeff Roberson, Design team leader, Eyring Corporation.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 77 
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A Programmable Unified Cache Support for GPRS Encryption System
Advances in wireless technology have allowed portable electronic devices to become smaller and more complex, placing stringent power, performance and security requirements on the device's components. To address the growing need for longer battery life, higher performance and enhanced security for 3G applications, an 8Kbyte, 4-way set-associative, unified (instruction and data) cache with programmable features was added to the M-CORE M3 core. These features include write mode selection, way management, and buffer enabling/disabling which allow the architecture to be optimized based on the application's requirements. In this paper, we present the features of the unified cache architecture and illustrate the usefullness effect on power and performance for a GPRS encryption module (GEM) through benchmark analysis and actual silicon measurements.

By Afzal Malik, David Gonzales, Embedded Platform Solutions, Motorola, Inc.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 81 
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CompactPCI in the Era of Convergence
Today solutions need to support the higher levels of availability, and provide easy and rapid serviceability, and the ability to scale. Scalability is the only way to meet ever-changing market demands. To manage this and still remain competitive, adherence to industry standards and open technology have become a strategic imperative. It is critical that systems incorporate components based on open, industry standards. CompactPCI is such a standard, as explained in this article.

By Ashley Eikenberry, Group Marketing Manager for OEM Board Products, Sun Microsystems.
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 88 
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Company Directory
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 94

Dedicated Systems Virtual Pressroom
RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 97

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RTOS UPDATE - 01q3 - p. 112