To succeed in today's increasingly competitive markets, manufacturers using embedded systems must bring complex applications for new products to market rapidly and economically. Developing embedded software applications has evolved from a relatively modest programming task to a complex engineering effort.
As more powerful and affordable 32 bit microprocessors have become available, products based on them have become richer in features and functions. Increasingly, embedded applications are being designed for 64 bit microprocessors, DSPs, and programmable logic devices. In addition, the complexity of embedded software applications is increasing dramatically, while the time available for product development is decreasing. More sophisticated software is required to develop these complex applications, frequently including an operating system that provides developers far more features, higher performance and greater productivity than was necessary or feasible for programming prior generations of microprocessors.
Wind River is a developer and marketer of advanced software operating systems and development tools to assist engineers in their product development efforts. This California-based company provides end-to-end product solutions, including hardware reference design single board computers, integrated development environments, operating systems (OS), networking protocols, and also 'standalone' tools that can be used with nonWind River operating systems. These are flexible solutions that allow customers to purchase specific products for their particular needs, while improving product reliability and time to market.
Products and services
The cornerstone of Wind River's software products is its suite of embedded operating systems that includes VxWorks and VxWorks AE, its most advanced family of operating systems offering both protection domains and high availability features: the pSOSystem family of operating systems; OSEKWorks in the automotive field; and a recently-acquired OS for DSPs.
These OSs are suitable for use in a broad range of embedded applications, including products in automotive, consumer electronics, wireless, industrial, telecom/datacom and server management technologies. Complementing this, Wind River also licenses its Tornado integrated development environment (IDE), which consists of a development platform and associated tools allowing customers to design, develop and test intended applications on a host development workstation. The Tornado IDE includes a comprehensive set of core and optional cross- development tools and utilities along with the VxWorks OS, and allows for the integration of a variety of third-party tools. A line of standalone development tools is also provided that customers can use with their own proprietary OS or with other third-party OS.
Wind River provides optional extensions and middleware to its OS that provide additional capabilities to developers. Customers can license and incorporate these into their underlying OS to provide features required for a customer's specific applications. As applications become more complex, especially for Web-enabled products, prepackaged middleware solutions have become more widely used to simplify development.
Hardware reference designs help facilitate the design and implementation of software solutions. These hardware products allow customers to incorporate portions of the reference design into their products or use the entire design as a development platform. This allows software programming to be tested for operability and functionality, and to be corrected for errors, early in the design cycle, advancing overall product development.
Customers' solutions
Wind River markets its software products in a variety of ways. These are designed to address the needs of a wide range of customers, including those that seek to design their own target applications entirely, those that seek to leverage an integrated solution toward a particular market, and those that also need design services and consulting with respect to the development of a specification, particular components or the target application itself. The company segments its customer base into five vertical solution areas: aerospace and military; automotive; consumer; networking and telecoms; and platforms.
Wind River products enable customers to enhance product performance, standardise designs across projects, reduce research and development costs and shorten product development cycles.
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