Trio teams up for comms and embedded

Trio teams up for comms and embedded
By Patrick Mannion, EE Times
July 23, 2001 (2:01 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010720S0094

MANHASSET, N.Y. — Wind River Systems Inc. (Alameda, Calif.) and StarCore Technology Center (Atlanta) have announced an agreement among Wind River, Agere Systems and Motorola to develop an integrated hardware and software development platform for DSP-driven system-on-a-chip (SoC) communications and embedded applications. Through the agreement, Wind River will optimize its multicore real-time operating system (RTOS) technology and development tools for the StarCore DSP architecture.

The StarCore announcement comes only weeks after Wind River and Improv Systems Inc. announced that Improv had become a WindLink partner. The partnership allows the two companies to tightly integrate Wind River's VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) and its Tornado integrated development environment (IDE) with Improv's configurable Jazz DSP core and accompanying tool set. Again, the target market is communications.

StarCore is the cooperative research and dev elopment initiative between Agere Systems and Motorola, with the objective to develop best-in-class DSP cores and development tools that aid Motorola and Agere in delivering DSP SoC solutions. Under the newly inked agreement, Wind River will develop and provide the Diab C/C++ compiler and RTA Suite of run-time analysis tools, a StarCore-targeted source level debugger and VisionProbe hardware debug tools to aid in the early stages of hardware bring-up, along with a future version of its Tornado IDE. In addition, Wind River will provide a multicore DSP operating system derived from technology recently acquired from Eonic Systems.

According to Al Hyman, strategic marketing manager for StarCore, the hardware aspect provided by the inclusion of VisionProbe debug tools is key. "This will allow designers to bring up their hardware quicker and in a comprehensive environment. The other two [Enea OSE and Lineo RTOS', which StarCore is also aligned with] haven't announced such a feature yet," he said.

While the hardware aspect was important, according to Hyman, the primary reason for StarCore's alignment with Wind River was the large developer base Wind River provides. "They have about 600 vendors," he said. "While all don't write for DSPs, a large chunk of them do — and that'll benefit us substantially."

When thinking of the agreement, StarCore factored in the needs of customers designing with both a CPU and a DSP for their communications systems. "These customers have one operating system for their CPU — ARM or whatever — then they have to turn around and come up with an operating system on the DSP," said Hyman. Wind River solves this, he said, by allowing those customers to service their CPU with VxWorks and service their DSP with Virtuoso. "This is all under the Tornado integrated development environment (IDE), which serves as the umbrella and unification point," said Hyman. "Now customers doing multichip implementations with a CPU and DSP can get all their development and run-time software from Wind River and run across multiple processors [in a heterogeneous or homogenous environment]."

"From our point of view," said Mark Edwards, Wind River's business development manager, "it brings the technology portfolio of the largest embedded software company in the world in alignment with two of the most significant DSP companies in the world — Motorola and Agere.

As for the Improv and Wind River agreement, the companies demonstrated the integration of their respective technologies at the Networld+Interop trade show in May. There, the companies showed a voice-over-IP prototype running application software based on the VxWorks RTOS with function calls directly to the Improv Jazz DSP core through a standard application programming interface.