Smartphone Market Growing Smartly

The market for smartphones, an important field for device software, looks strong, says market research firm Canalys. Global shipments of smart mobile devices rose by 75 percent in the third quarter, relative to the year-earlier quarter. What's more, the market is shifting very quickly to converged smartphones: Shipments of standalone handhelds actually fell by 18 percent, Canalys says, while those for converged smartphones more than doubled in volume.

By vendor, it was a good quarter for Nokia. The Finnish phone maker shipped a record 7.1 million smartphones, 142 percent more than it did a year earlier. That gave it a 55 percent share of the worldwide smart mobile-device market. The No. 2 vendor by share was Palm, which had a mixed report card; while its third-quarter shipments fell 2 percent overall, shipments of its Treo smartphones rose by more than 70 percent, overtaking the company's handhelds for first time and giving Palm an 8 percent market share. These two leaders were followed by RIM (7.5 percent market share), Motorola (5.3 percent), Hewlett-Packard (4.2 percent), and good old Other (20 percent), says Canalys.

Linux is making a mark in the smartphone business. Motorola shipped more than 690,000 smartphones in the third quarter, up from fewer than 62,000 units a year earlier, and the company was helped "significantly" by shipments its Linux-based smart phones in China. According to Canalys, the Moto phones' handwriting recognition capabilities have proved popular among Chinese consumers.

For more information on the report, see this Canalys press release.

Posted at 12:53 PM | Comments

The State of Design Automation Tools

In my Oct. 18 entry I promised to report on Venture Development Corp.'s new report on embedded system design automation tools. A few days late, here's my report.

The worldwide market for these tools was worth $350 million last year, VDC says. Of this, a bit less than half came from license fees, with the rest going to consulting and other services. Growth, which VDC calls "significant," will be driven by several factors, including: continued growth in the aero/military and auto markets; renewed strength in telecom and datacom; a continued desire to manage the growing complexity of embedded systems in cost-effective ways; an interest in leveraging the code base for future products and extending products through a platform-based development approach; and growing acceptance of model-driven design.

What could stop the market? Continuing concerns over the usability of solutions, VDC says, along with too-high costs associated with tools, training, and implementation. Finally, there's the chance that design teams will resist migrating from their proprietary platforms and development methodologies to those of third parties.

Posted at 01:17 PM | Comments

Talk Back to the DSO.com Blog

Welcome to our new blog look and feel. DSO.com has just moved to the very spiffy Movable Type software. The benefit? We now look like a real blog. Even better, registered members of DSO.com can now post replies to my blog entries. Both my blogs and all replies are readable by anyone. But you must be a registered, signed-in user to post replies.

If you're not yet registered with DSO.com, or you're not logged in, you can do both from the DSO log-in page. Enter your e-mail address. If you're already registered, you'll be logged in. if not, you'll be shown a blank registration form; fill it out, and join us. Either way, DSO.com registration is your ticket to talking back. It also gets you access to white papers from our sponsors and other members-only content.

By the way, for any history buffs, my older, pre-MovableType blog entries are still available. You can browse through my old blogs from this DSO.com blog archives page.

What do you think? Now you can tell us!

Posted at 04:24 PM | Comments

Test Automation Tools Taking Off

Venture Development Corp. has just published a white paper on embedded system test automation tools (here's the executive summary in PDF format). Among the top findings:

• The market for test automation tools and related services totaled $83.4 million last year, up nearly 20 percent from 2003. About 60 percent of the 2004 figure came from product licenses.

• The sales uptick was driven by the improving financial health of OEMs, OEMs' recognition that testing is an integral part of the development process, and demands for greater device functionality.

• IBM is the leading vendor of test automation tools for embedded applications with its Test Real Time product.

VDC is also issuing a white paper on embedded system design automation tools. I'll report on that later this week.

Posted at 01:32 PM | Comments

ARMed and Ready

Here's some of what's new on the DSO front: Enea demos OSE for TI OMAP...ARM reveals other Cortex licensees...and EMF helping NASA adviser.

At last week's ARM Developers' Conference, Enea demonstrated its OSE real-time operating system (RTOS), development tools and board support packages (BSP) for Texas Instruments’ OMAP platform. Enea says its OSE was the first RTOS to support OMAP’s ARM and DSP cores, and that it is the only RTOS that offers a single API for developing robust, scaleable, multimedia-enhanced applications for OMAP’s ARM and DSP cores. (For more info, see this Enea statement.)

Speaking of ARM, last week came reports that Texas Instruments would be the first to license the company's new Cortex-A8 processor. Turns out TI has already been joined by several other licensees, namely, Freescale, Matsushita, and Samsung, says ARM (see a copy of the statement here). The Cortex processor is an applications processor based on the new ARMv7 architecture; it reportedly delivers up to 2,000 DMIPS (the D is for Dhrystone), aiming it at such processor-hungry apps as audio and games.

Jerry Krasner, founder of Embedded Market Forecasters and an occasional DSO.com columnist, tells us his firm is supplying its dashboard and database to Lone Star Aerospace, a company that is helping NASA define its 30-year plan for software use and deployment. Lone Star also consults to the Navy, Air Force, and their primes.

Posted at 01:38 PM | Comments

Aonix Updates ObjectAda

Software-development solutions supplier Aonix released the latest version of its ObjectAda development environment at the recent Embedded Systems Conference in Boston.

Release 8.2 targets Linux as the first supported operating system. New features in this version include the ability to attach the symbolic debugger to a running Ada application. ObjectAda 8.2 is also the first ObjectAda release that lets developers choose between the traditional Aonix IDE for development and the new AonixADT Eclipse plug-in. (Here's the Aonix press release.)

Posted at 02:42 PM | Comments

Linux for the Little Guy

Today, DSO software supplier (and DSO.com sponsor) Wind River announced both a consumer-products platform for its commercial grade Linux and a security-based partnership with chipmaker ARM.

The new platform, called Wind River Platform for Consumer Devices – Linux Edition, is designed as a small-footprint, fast-booting platform for consumer devices that include mobile phones, video recorders, and set-top boxes. The platform is based on Linux Kernal 2.6, includes an Eclipse-based IDE, and supports a wide range of both hardware (including ARM, Xscale, and MIPS) and software (including Java). (You can get the official version on Wind River's site here.)

Meanwhile, Wind River's partnership with ARM mainly means thatWind River has enhanced its Linux platforms with ARM's TrustZone technology, which secures consumer products running on Symbian OS, Linux, WinCE, and other operating systems. ARM's involvement is limited to providing technology, documentation and other support to Wind. (More official details on Wind River's site here.)

Wind River is having some nice success with its commercial-grade Linux, by the way. According to Venture Development Corp., commercial Linux now makes up 26 percent of the commercial device software market, up from 13 percent last year. Not only is this a bigger chunk, but it's also a bigger chunk of a market that has grown by 16 percent year-to-year. Wind River's share of the market for commercial Linux for devices has grown from less than 5 percent last year to just under 40 percent today, VDC says.

Speaking of VDC, they're impressed by the Green Hills/I-Logix partnership announced earlier this week (see DSO.com's article on the announcement). The deal, VDC says in its latest bulletin, "has the potential to reshape competition within many key embedded vertical markets," assuming the two partners execute well and their products work as advertised. While other vendors have tried to bridge the UML/IDE gap, VDC believes the Green Hills/I-Logix partnership has several advantages over them. For one, it's a partnership, not a merger. For another, the two companies are among the top three suppliers in their respective markets, with strong reputations. Look out, Aonix, Mentor Graphics, and IAR?

Posted at 01:52 PM | Comments

VxWorks 6 Gains Green Hill Support

Here's what's new in the DSO community: Green Hills announced it will support Wind River's VxWorks 6...Phoenix has become a Microsoft Windows embedded partner...and Sun says it will support MontaVista Linux.

Green Hills announced that its MULTI development environment now supports Wind River Systems’ VxWorks RTOS version 6. In the process, Green Hills says, the vendor has outdone Wind River in becoming the first vendor to offer a single development environment that supports both versions 5 and 6 of VxWorks. (Wind River supports both, but offers Tornado for 5, Workbench for 6.)

Phoenix Technologies has joined Microsoft's Windows Embedded Partner (WEP) program as a Gold-level member. (See the official release.) Phoenix will offers embedded developers its CoreArchitect, a developer tool built on Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

Sun Microsystems recently a blade server that supports MontaVista Linux. (See the official Sunflash.) Sun's Netra ATCA blade server will come in two versions: the SPARC processor blade should ship by year's end, while an AMD Opteron processor-based blade is set for Q1 of next year. Sun announced support for MontaVista Carrier Grade Edition (CGE). It also says MontaVista is working on an optimized port of its Linux environment for Sun's ATCA blade platform and multi-core AMD Opteron processor-based blade server.

Posted at 01:58 PM | Comments