Thomson-CSF SA subsidiary Cetia SA will release its first PowerPC-based PowerEngine processor boards and workstations in November, just a couple of months later than previously expected. The Toulon firm specialises in VMEbus workstations and processor boards for real-time applications. The first PowerPC boards – UniflashXT – will run a tweaked version of IBM Corp’s AIX operating system, into which Cetia says it is building PowerOpen compliance. Cetia – a founder member of the PowerOpen Association – expects full PowerOpen operating system specifications to be made available in a month or so. It also plans to introduce a PowerPC-based workstation at the same time, again running an implementation of AIX. This will come with 256Mb memory and 400Mb to 2Gb of disk. A further slew of board and workstation products will follow in December. These are being jointly developed with Los Gatos, California-based software house Lynx Real-time Systems Inc, and run under the latter’s Posix-compliant Unix operating system, LynxOS. The UniLT boards are optimised for real-time applications and the workstation version has identical specifications to the AIX box. Both board products will cost between $5,000 and $6,000 workstations will start at $9,000 – and will be offered to systems integrators and OEM customers. Cetia has distributors in the US, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries and says it expects to sign up others in the UK and Canada.
