After a flurry of initial publicity a few years ago (CI No 2,625) super skinny operating systems developer Tao Systems Ltd has been keeping a low profile. But now it’s ready to bring its technology to market as a commercially available product for the first time. Elate, previously known as Taos, is billed as a portable, memory efficient and high-performance software platform for the embedded systems marketplace, which can run either standalone or on top of host operating systems and across all processors. Elate uses Tao’s VP2 technology, where all code is written to run as if on a virtual processor – an imaginary 32-bit little-endien RISC and subsequently translated into native code for the actual processor at load time. This makes the support of a new processor a much easier task, taking eight man weeks for a typical RISC port, twelve man weeks for a more complex CISC chip. Currently Elate supports Intel x86, PowerPC and Advanced RISC Marchines Ltd processors, although the company says it’s an easy matter to port it to any chip, even 128-bit very long instruction word chips or the 24-bit Harvard architecture digital signal processors found in some hand held devices. Elate also uses object-based dynamic binding technology so that only tools needed to support the specific application needed are loaded into memory, rather than all the application code and libraries required by most operating systems. The result is a significantly smaller footprint and longer battery life, says the company. Tao chief executive Francis Charig claims the operating system is suitable for use in everything from mobile phones up to network computers, and Motorola Inc, which invested in the company last March (CI No 3,126), appears to think likewise. He claims systems such Lucent Technologies Inc’s Inferno and Sun Micrososystems Inc’s Chorus technology and not anywhere near as portable, and much slower and larger. But Charig says he is not ignoring the real world, and says his strategy, not yet fully revealed, will take into account the market presence of both Microsoft Corp’s Windows CE and Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java. We have to fit in with both Microsoft and Java, and have to integrate with the PC and server market, he says. In March the company will launch a portable, low footprint graphics toolkit for embedded devices based on the Elate technology. Tao, which is based in Reading in the UK, isn’t giving away any specific details of price and availability yet.
