By Phil Jones
Integrated Systems Inc, the embedded real-time operating systems and tool developer, will today announce the first of series of reference platforms for next generation internet appliances. The first fruits of the Sunnyvale, California company’s Internet Appliance Vantage Program is a near-market ready, Java-based personal digital assistant (PDA) with built in mobile communications. It represents a shot across the bows of Wind River Systems Inc, its embedded RTOS rival which has done its best to make the nascent post-PC appliance space its own.
According to Mike Osler, ISI’s UK managing director, the new Vantage Program is an attempt to do for the emerging internet appliance market, what the IBM PC architecture did for the early microcomputer business: establishing a design template that interested vendors can use to mix and match different products and components, and bring finished systems to market more quickly.
In this first instance, ISI’s San Diego design-house subsidiary, Doctor Design, has pulled together the 80MHz M32R low-power processor with 2MB of on chip RAM, with Sun’s pJava language running on ISI’s own pSOS embedded RTOS. The pen interface device is also supplied with the Java DeviceTop email and personal information manager (PIM) packages of Espial Group. For manufacturers that don’t want to use Java, ISI can supply the reference platform running email software from the UK’s ANT Ltd natively against pSOS.
The whole platform is available on a free license basis to any credible manufacturer of such devices said Osler, with ISI and its partners set to recoup their investment via royalty revenues. And the reference platform is almost infinitely customizable, he claims. Different processors and application packages can be swapped in and out according to demand, Osler said, the unifying feature being ISI’s pSOS RTOS and its accompanying range of design and integration tools.
ISI is betting on the Vantage Program, which filled out over the time with designs for other classes of internet device, such as cable modems or mobile phones, being a hit with consumer device makers and other systems builders keen to compress the design cycle involved with bringing new products to market. Using a Vantage reference platform could, hypothetically, allow a manufacture such as SONY to bring an internet ready PDA to market in a matter of months, Osler claims, with ISI providing design, porting and integration consultancy and services as required.
Indeed, Osler argues that the extensive support services, such as access to the Doctor Design design services, which ISI can offer to support the Vantage Program is likely to be its key competitive differentiator. In a veiled reference to competitors such as Wind River, Osler said the off-the-shelf RTOS market is no longer driven by strictly technical issues. These days customers don’t come back for the fastest RTOS, or the cutest compiler. They come back for services, he said.
