Henley, Oxford based Alsys Ltd and Thorn EMI Plc’s Inmos Interna tional are to supply validated Ada compilers for the Inmos Trans puter as Inmos seeks to expand further into the military market place. There are currently 60 Transputer-based products on the market, another 250 are being developed and 700 are under evalua tion. Inmos has been successful in selling into the graphics, control and telecommunications markets, and although defence accounts for only a tiny proportion of sales at the moment, Inmos looks for the market will represent 25% of total sales in two years. It also says that Transputers qualified to Military Standard 883C will be available next year. The first, available in the first quarter, will be the military version of the IMS T800, to be followed by military versions of the 32-bit and 16 bit integer Transputers later in the year. Defence applications include embedded avionic control systems, satellite surveillance systems, image recognition, distributed orbital control systems and simulation. The new Ada compilation system for the Transpu ter is based on the Alsys Root Technology which has been applied to the Intel 80086, Motorola 68000, DEC VAX, HP1000 and IBM 370 and is the outcome of a design study carried out by Alsys, Inmos and Meiko Ltd, Bristol. The first two products, due for delivery in July 1989, will be a cross-compiler to run on DEC VAXes under VMS, and a host compiler running on an IMS T800 Transputer on an MS-DOS co-processor board. In both cases code will be targeted to the range of 16-bit and 32-bit Transputers, including the IMS T800 floating point Transputer. Alsys says development work can begin immediately with its currently available validated compiler which runs on the VAX host. The resulting application software can then be recompiled with the Transputer Ada compiler when it arrives. The Transputer microprocessor has RISC instruction set, on-chip memory and fast point-to-point communications links that can pass data to other Transputers.
