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IntervalZero, ESD Electronic System Design Gmbh Strengthen Technology Partnership
POSTED 11/19/2014
WALTHAM, MA & NUREMBURG, Germany — US-headquartered real-time software developer IntervalZero and its longtime technology partner esd gmbh of Germany today further strengthened their relationship with the announcement of esd’s release of its EtherCAT Master Stack for IntervalZero’s RTX64.
SMP-enabled RTX64 2014 is a key component of the IntervalZero RTOS Platform that comprises x86 and x64 multicore multiprocessors, the Microsoft Windows operating system, and real-time Ethernet capabilities such as esd’s EtherCAT Master Stack to outperform real-time hardware and reduce the development costs for systems that require determinism or hard real-time.
“We are very pleased the esd has released their new Master Stack so quickly after RTX64 2014 became available. Being able to take advantage of the very best real-time EtherCAT capabilities is a way for our RTX64 2014 customers in industrial markets and many others markets to develop and deliver best-in-class products that can meet their determinism requirements, said Fabrice Boisset, IntervalZero’s General Manager in EMEA.
esd gmbh is an experienced system integrator that delivers products, turn-key solutions and services to the industrial automation, process control, automotive, medical, aerospace and test & measurement industries. It offers a comprehensive range of EtherCAT hardware, software and services including a master and slave stack implementation for IntervalZero RTX64 and RTX, plus the configuration and diagnostic tool EtherCAT Workbench for Windows. RTX64 2014, which was released in September 2014, includes a new monitoring infrastructure, improved debugging capabilities, and additional functionality that strengthen the product.
In RTX64 2014 the real-time subsystem (RTSS) has a new monitoring infrastructure that allows developers to profile the behavior of RTSS applications across all RTSS processors.
Additionally the product’s WinDbg extension extends Microsoft’s 64-bit version of WinDbg and provides a way to analyze and interpret the state of RTSS processes and the subsystem.
The initial release of RTX64 in early 2013 marked the introduction the only true, native 64-bit extension of the Windows operating system. IntervalZero is the only vendor to deliver SMP RTOS capabilities on Windows. “Over the course of two years we developed RTX64 from the ground up to dovetail specifically with Windows 64-bit OS and it represents a remarkable achievement by our engineering team. RTX64 2014 builds significantly on that work and it is an even more powerful and more valuable product for our worldwide customers,” said CEO Jeffrey Hibbard.
Real-time applications running on 64-bit Windows with RTX64 2014 can access 128GB of non-paged memory, depending on actual mapped physical RAM size. By comparison 32-bit Windows 7 has a non-paged memory limitation of 2GB. Overall, 64-bit Windows’ 512GB of physical memory dwarfs the 4GB physical memory limitation in 32-bit Windows.
“The value of increased, directly accessible real-time memory within Windows, and the resulting superior performance distinguishes RTX64 from virtualization alternatives and 32-bit based RTOS solutions,” Hibbard said. “This changes the economics of Industrial Automation equipment because all the proprietary real-time hardware can be replaced by software applications that run on x86 cores. This means that new functionality such as machine vision can be implemented at a fraction of the cost that was required before, and both quality and throughput can increase as well.