Open Source Code as Solution for Your SW Needs
Essensium uses several technologies that are mainly based on Free and Open Source Software for building your embedded SW solutions.
Linux
Linux is a Free Software general purpose, POSIX compliant Operating System (UNIX-like). Essensium has experience running Linux on x86, PowerPC, ARM, 68000, MIPS, SH3/SH4, Synthetic target, S/390, HP PA Risc, Digital Alpha, Sun Sparc, OpenRISC, Leon Sparc, ... Essensium's developers developed the original Token Ring drivers and the original port of Linux to the PowerPC. Linux and an accompanying libc have a typical size of 2 MB. Linux is not hard real-time as it tries to optimize throughput rather then real-time response time.
eCos
eCos is a smaller hard real-time Operating System, that is also licensed under a Free License. The footprint is around 20 - 200 kByte and TCP/IP networking is also included. eCos does not require a MMU (Memory Management Unit), but in return does not offer memory protection on CPU's that do have an MMU. eCos is an excellent choice as Operating System for a deeply embedded system. It can be accompanied by a second processor that is running Linux for the more high-end networking tasks and other task or standard deamons that are preferably ran in a memory protected model.
Eclipse
Eclipse is an open and extensible integrated development environment, which allows the developer to write, test and debug his programs in a comfortable way. The consistent user interface allows an easy transition to Eclipse. Mind delivers a custom installation of Eclipse for easy application development.
GNU-tools
The GNU tools are a set of Free software tools, such as gcc (the GNU C Compiler), gdb (GNU Debugger), make (GNU tool for managing complex builds), ddd (graphical front-end to act as an IDE during debugging) etc... . These tools are used as cross-compilers and cross-debuggers to work from a typical Linux on x86 host to a embedded target (mainly ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, SH/3/4 and x86 target).
Aicas: Real-time Java (JVM)
Aicas provides a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) solution with hard real-time guarantees on the Garbage Collection process. This is combined with WAOT (Way Ahead Of Time) compilation of Java code to reach drastic performance increases over interpreted code. JIT (Just In Time compilation) is often not practical on embedded systems, due to the extensive resources JIT would consume. These resources are often not available on embedded systems.