Wind River to roll DSP real-time OS

Known as VSPWorks, the new product is believed to be a key to enabling Wind River to keep a foothold in the wireless market, especially as that market migrates to third-generation (3G) systems. "With the whole world getting so excited about 3G wireless, there's going to be a lot of interest in DSP," noted Daya Nadamuni, senior analyst for Gartner Dataquest (San Jose, Calif.). "Most of those systems are going to have a DSP on board."

The company's new platform will provide developers with the VSPWorks real-time OS (RTOS) and a graphical user interface-driven integrated development environment. The IDE is said to be optimized for creating applications with small-memory footprint requir ements using multiple DSPs or a combination of DSPs and traditional CPUs.

The new product rollout gives Wind River an entry into the DSP RTOS market, which up until now has been populated by a large percentage of users who wrote their own operating systems.

A few commercial operating systems have been offered up to now, including OSE Systems' (San Jose, Calif.) OSE RTOS, which has been used by such customers as Ericsson and Agere Systems Inc., and RidgeRun Inc.'s (Houston) DSPLinux operating system. At the end of last year, RidgeRun teamed with Texas Instruments Inc. to deliver an "end-to-end" embedded Linux development suite for TI DSPs.

Still, commercial real-time OSes haven't yet taken hold in the DSP market, analysts said. "A lot of DSP operating systems are still being developed in-house," Nadamuni said. "But that will start to change soon."

One reason for the change is the rising popularity of DSPs. A recent EE Times branding survey revealed that 55 percent of de velopers have used multiprocessor designs, and a large majority of developers say they are willing to move back and forth from traditional CPUs to DSPs.

"We're seeing increased complexity, as well as developers who are building systems with new kinds of components," said Gareth Noyes, market development manager for Wind River's DSP and multicore products.