Microsoft Embedded Developers Conference Coming in May

If you're involved with Microsoft Embedded, you should know about the software vendor's Mobile & Embedded DevCon. The 2006 edition is taking place May 8-11 in Las Vegas.

One new feature of MEDC this year will be a code porting and testing lab. Developers will be able to get code-porting help from Microsoft Embedded support teams. They will also be able to test their code on devices preconfigured with OEM- and operator-specific settings.

The conference will also feature a series of pre-conference tutorials on May 8. Topics will include app dev for Windows Mobile, building devices using Win XP Embedded, and managing & deploying devices.

Full details on this MEDC '06 page.

Posted at 01:21 PM | Comments

Wind River's Upbeat Presentation

Ken Klein, CEO of Wind River, gave an upbeat presentation at D.A. Davidson & Co.'s fourth annual technology conference in Park City, Utah, this morning. While there wasn't a great deal that would be new for DSO.com readers, Klein did sprinkle in a few new insights:

Wind River has increased its market share from 30% to 40%, or four times that of its next largest competitor. And the company believes there's lots of growth potential, with only 10% of the overall market having been penetrated to date.

The company will make a major announcement every six months, in part to keep renewals strong. This means the company's next big announcement will come in the spring.

For the company's Q3, ended Oct. 31, 2005, revenue broke down as follows:

• Run-time licenses (per-unit): Accounted for 30% of revenue, or $20 million.
• Perpectual license (per project, legacy): Accounted for 17% of revenue, or $11.4 million.
• Maintenance: 12% of revenue, or $8.1 million.
• Services: 14%, or $9.6 million.
• Subscriptions: 27%, or $18.5 million.

Wind River's cash situation is improving. Under Klein's leadership, the company has brought its debt down to $42 million from $190 million, as of Q3. The company has just under $200 million in cash in the bank, so that means $158 million of it is "free." That's important, obviously, for future innovations.

Device software is doubling every two years, a kind of Moore's Law for devices. Today, the average device has 1 million lines of code; in two years, that will be 2 million lines, Wind River expects.

Finally, watch for Wind River's Q4 and full-year results on March 8, Klein said.

You can hear his full presentation from this Webcast page.

Posted at 04:27 PM | Comments

Green Hills Joins TI Network

RTOS vendor Green Hills Software has joined Texas Instruments' TMS320 Third Party Network as a software and embedded services provider. As part of the arrangement, Green Hills' Multi IDE now supports TI's DaVinci technology.

Green Hills says its solution for DaVinci provides a comprehensive suite of development tools, OS, and middleware running on the general-purpose processor ARM core and the latest TI Digital Signal Processor (DSP) core, the C64x+ core.

Green Hills plans to demo its DaVinci development solution at the TI North American Developer Conference, Feb. 28 - March 2 in Dallas.

Posted at 02:04 PM | Comments

Introducing DSO World

If you're still considering whether to attend the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley this April, here's a great reason to go: DSO World. It's a new show-within-the-show at this year's ESC that will focus on device software optimization.

DSO World promises to be the place to get up-to-date, practical information to help technology and business managers choose the best strategies and approaches to deliver the performance, scalability, and ROI that device manufacturers must deliver to their customers.

DSO World will operate from the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 4; all day on Wednesday, April 5; and most of the day on Thursday, April 6. (ESC runs April 3-7 in the same venue.)

I'll be there, and I hope to see you there, too. You can find more details on the DSO.com Events Page, and you can register to attend on the ESC registration page. If your company is interested in being one of DSO World's sponsors, the ESC page also lists contact info for the conference sales team.

Posted at 10:15 AM | Comments

Esterel, Green Hills Partner to Speed Time to Market

Speaking of faster time to market, Green Hills and Esterel Technologies are partnering to create what they call the first complete model-driven solution for safety-critical device software development.

For those who don't know Esterel, it's a provider of design tools including the Scade Suite, a safety-critical app-dev environment, and Esterel Studio, which handles chip design, validation and verification. Esterel's customers are mostly in the defense/aero and auto industries, and they include Airbus, Dassault, GM, and Johnson Controls.

Under the agreement, Esterel's Scade Suite will produce code that will be automatically integrated with Green Hills' Integrity RTOS. And Green Hill's compilers will be pre-certified by Scade, so that any code produced by Scade and then compiled by Green Hills tools will go to certification quickly and relatively easily.

How does this speed time to market? By eliminating the need for developers to use separate environments for application software modeling on the one hand, and implementation to target on the other, say the two companies. Apparently, the integrated solution generates target code in C, directly from the Scade model, that is compliant with both DO-178B (the de facto standard for aviation software) and IEC 61508 (an international standard for safety-related systems).

For more details, here's the full press release.

Posted at 10:23 AM | Comments

Getting to Market Faster

We can quibble over what is and what isn't DSO, but everyone agrees that getting devices to market quickly is a new, pressing requirement. So a new DSO.com In-Depth article is required reading: Speeding Time to Market.

To prepare this article, DSO.com contributing writer Paul Hyman spoke with a handful of DSO experts, including Joel Osman of Accenture Technology Labs, Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions, Jerry Krasner of Embedded Market Forecasters, and Djenana Campara of Klocwork. After talking with these experts, Paul came up with this quick list of top time-to-market tips and tricks:

1. Adopt industry standards.
2. "Plan" rather than "plunge" with simulation modeling.
3. Enhance reusability with layering.
4. Unravel "hairballs" with static-analysis tools.
5. Adopt life-cycle testing.

Posted at 09:58 AM | Comments

Enea Reports Full-Year Financials

Device-software supplier Enea just reported its 2005 full-year results. The good news is, the company reported its seventh consecutive quarter of sales growth and profitability. The bad: Sales to new customers fell short of Enea's expectations.

For the full year, net sales increased by 9% to SEK (Swedish kronor) 712 million, up from SEK 656 million a year earlier. Adjusted for divested units, net sales increased by 20%. Software sales increased by 17% to SEK 238 million, accounting for a third of net sales.

Operating profit for the full year was SEK 56 million, up from SEK 21 million a year earlier. Operating margins rose, too, hitting 8%, up from 3% a year ago.

Q4 results were mixed. Net sales hit SEK 194 million, up 4% from the year-earlier quarter. But operating profits declined to SEK 17 million, down from SEK 24 million in the year-earlier quarter.

In his CEO's note, Johan Wall points out that while sales to existing customers were fine, sales to new customers during the year "did not fully meet expectations." The result, he adds: "poorer software sales than expected" in North America and Europe--excluding the Nordic Region, where presumably sales were pretty good.

(At today's exchange rate, 1 Swedish krona equals US$ 0.1485)

Lots more detail here:
Full-Year Report for 2005.

Posted at 11:43 AM | Comments

What's Up At MontaVista?

RTOS vendor MontaVista is going through some changes. CEO Jim Ready recently stepped down. VP of marketing Kelly Herrel has resigned (and his position remains open). And the company is talking to the business press about a possible IPO this year.

I experienced a bit of the company's tumult first-hand last month while working with DSO.com contributor Larry Lange. Larry was lining up interviews with Ready and other MontaVista executives for a company profile I had asked him to write. Initially, a MontaVista PR man gave us the green light and said he would help Larry arrange the interviews with company execs. Larry waited...and waited...and then waited some more. Finally, the PR man told us the interview with Ready wasn't going to happen, and we decided to hold fire on the profile (no CEO, no article, was my thinking). The next day, the gears clicked when we learned that Ready would be stepping down from the CEO post, though not leaving the company.

What happened? A Feb. 6 article in BusinessWeek,
MontaVista's Uncertain View, doesn't exactly solve the mystery, but writer Sara Lacy says that should the company go public, investors will be looking for a CEO who is more of a name brand than Ready. She also writes that Wind River could be an very sharp thorn in MontaVista's side, pointing out that the DSO vendor is "already in all of the major accounts that MontaVista has spent six years scrapping for." Stay tuned!

Posted at 05:36 PM | Comments

Embedded Systems Conference Coming to Silicon Valley

The Embedded Systems Conference - Silicon Valley is coming to the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose on April 3-7. This year's event will feature nearly 275 sessions.

The program will include a presentation on the "Embedded Revolution" by Doug Davis, VP of the digital enteprise group at Intel. A Linux design seminar will examine porting existing systems to Linux, device-driver tradeoffs, a home Media Center built with Linux on PowerPC, and more. Other seminars of interest to DSO practitioners include an under-the-hood look at Eclipse, architectural design of device drivers, and building trust into embedded devices (no easy feat!).

Learn more on the Embedded Systems Conference site.

Posted at 11:03 AM | Comments

Enea Adds Networking-Equipment Platform Support

Happy Groundhog Day? What's so happy about it? Punxsatawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, meaning we'll have six more weeks of winter. But at least Enea broadened its RTOS to a new platform. (How's that for a segue?) In fact, Enea announced yesterday that its OSE software now runs on Cavium Network's Octeon line of multicore processors, which are used by networking equipment OEMs.

Recently, Cavium had expanded the Octeon line with 10 SOCs (system on chips), each containing one or two MIPS64 cores. The Octeon processors are designed for use in a variety of OEM networking equipment, including routers, switches, gateways, storage networking equipment, and servers.

Enea already serves the telecom industry with clients that include Ericsson Radio, Lucent, and Spidcom. So the Cavium deal simply lets Enea play in a broader market—one, I hope, that remains free of groundhogs.

More groundhog-free details here: Enea's Real-Time OS to be Available...

Posted at 12:21 PM | Comments