Transform Windows into a Real-Time Operating System

In today’s hyper-competitive and wired global economy, standard pre-integrated app development platforms are increasingly in demand because they allow companies to focus solely on delivering value-added applications.

Android and iPhone apps are excellent examples. With the supporting infrastructure already in place, smartphone app developers are using those platforms to build and deploy apps with confidence. No development resources or time are spent building custom DSP or FPGA hardware or operating systems. The platforms provide all the necessary computing resources, integrate the components, and insure both inter-operability and stability, freeing app developers to concentrate on capturing their intellectual property in the app.

IntervalZero Can Help

For more than a decade, IntervalZero has been developing a real-time platform that is designed for complex, powered systems. Standard Windows-driven PCs and IntervalZero’s symmetric multiprocessing-enabled RTX64 (64-bit) real-time software are key components of a standard, pre-integrated real-time platform for building the many complex hard real-time apps that also require the sophisticated user interface Windows provides. IntervalZero has long believed that commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) PCs would be the foundation of this platform, and today’s x86 and x64 multi-core multiprocessor-powered PCs provide opportunities to both change markets and to create new ones.

OEMs and end users in industries such as Industrial Automation, Robotics, Digital Media, Semiconductors, Medical, Textiles, Aerospace/Defense, and Test and Measurement have used the RTX-based real-time platform for years. Today, IntervalZero is enhancing the platform by pre-integrating and testing more app components, allowing OEM’s to jump-start projects to get to market faster and to penetrate new markets.

Difference between real-time operating systems and hardware

Companies that have traditionally relied on FPGAs and DSPS to satisfy their hard-real time requirements in systems with a sophisticated user experience face many challenges:

• Relentless pressure to get to market faster at a lower cost by taking advantage of COTS
• Increased competition from smaller-form-factor systems with higher quality
• The need to open new markets to continue to grow.

CEOs, CFOs, and product management at these companies recognize the value of replacing proprietary FPGA and DSPs with a software component that runs in real-time as a component of an off-the-shelf PC.

IntervalZero offers RTX64 as part of a real-time platform that:

• Reduces the product cost of the PC-based platform by 25-50%
• Reduces the operational costs of producing and supporting product by 10-20% 
• Shortens the cycle-time of getting new generations of products to market
• Increases market share by opening new markets not previously reachable and doing so profitably

Unlike traditional architectures that rely on two development environments and two subsystems to deliver both the real-time and the sophisticated user interface, RTX64 is unique in that they support the creation of a single, integrated system that executes a Windows-based HMI and the real-time system in parallel with SMP architecture on a single PC, thereby radically reducing the development costs and significantly improving the quality of embedded systems.