Real-time Solutions

Ampersand has a successful track record in developing hard and soft real-time solutions, dating back to our founder's technical work on Multibus and VME systems in the early 1980s.

A Brief History of Real-Time

Staying current in real-time technology is critical to building cost-effective systems, perhaps even more than in other technical domains. Because Ampersand has been involved with real-time and embedded systems since 1983, we’ve observed many changes in the industry.

The early 1980s were dominated by custom processor and IO cards, custom kernels, and download and debug environments based upon serial protocols. The mid-1980s saw the emergence of bus standards (Multibus and VME), Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware in the form of Single Board Computers (SBCs) and IO devices, and COTS software kernels such as VRTX and PSos. Not until the late 1980s were sophisticated debug environments created, such as Wind River System’s VxWorks. The 1990s have seen revolutionary improvement in the debug tools available to real-time developers, WindView and Tornado being two examples.

Test equipment has come a long way during this period with the emergence of high performance bus analyzers, continued evolution of In Circuit Emulators (ICE), and sophisticated logic analyzers.

Building Quality Real-time Systems

The art of constructing a state-of-the-art real-time system consists of knowing what is available commercially off-the-shelf, and what has to be built for the customer’s specific application. Today, most if not all hardware components should be available commercially.

Customers should utilize as much test equipment and COTS software as possible, including Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS), tools, hardware and software analyzers, code purifiers, etc. The goal is to maximize the efficiency of the engineers developing the system.

Real-time system design should focus on modularity, which means developing independent components that interact through public interfaces. Object-oriented design techniques are the make-or-break difference in creating robust, reliable systems. All software and hardware should be designed for testability and traceability; it’s important to build this in at the beginning.

Ampersand and Real-Time

Ampersand has extensive skills in real-time system development:

• Ampersand is a WindLink partner of Wind River Systems, and is expert at utilizing WRS software
• Ampersand expects to become a Mercury Alliance Partner in the near future, and is expert at developing systems based upon Mercury’s RACE compute environment
• Ampersand can develop Board Support Packages (BSPs) and device drivers for VxWorks and MC/OS as well as for Solaris and Windows NT
• Ampersand has domain skills in servo control, communication protocols, machine and robotic control, semiconductor protocols, and image processing

We invest heavily in keeping our staff up-to-speed on the latest tools and techniques available for developing real-time systems. This results in efficient development of software and systems whenever our engineers are involved.

The Bottom Line

Ampersand represents a solid choice for outsourcing real-time projects because of our top-notch staff and in-depth knowledge of tools and techniques for building real-time systems.