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Whose software
makes the world go round?
The various policies of the
European Union, ranging from agriculture to advanced technology,
have evolved over the last 40 years largely in response to the
social and industrial problems of Europe. In the area of advanced
technology, this response has been primarily due t.o the threat
of Japanese and American competition in this important sector.
Fragmentation of the European market meant that European manufacturers
in electronics and telecommunications were accounting for no
more than a 5 per cent share of world markets.
In 1984 the European Union
initiated ‘Esprit’ (European Strategic Programme for
Research and Development in Information Technology), which has
subsequently become
their largest programme with funding running to several billion
dollars. The three main objectives of Esprit were - to enable
the European information technology (IT) business to meet the
competition of the 199Os, to promote European industrial co-operation
in IT and to contribute to the development of internationally
accepted standards. Many hundreds of projects exist within Esprit,
most are jointly funded by the European Commission and European
commercial organisations. These projects are grouped as programmes
under the various technology areas they address. One such programme
is the Open Microprocessor systems Initiative (OMI).
The Open
Microprocessor systems Initiative
The overall vision of OMI is
for Europe to have a credible, word-class standing in the provision
of microprocessor systems and related technology. To achieve
this vision, OMI are establishing common standards and technology
requirements; engaging in collaborative activities; focusing
on embedded applications areas which are strong in Europe - such
as telecommunications and transportation; ensuring the European
microprocessor systems technology is both world-class and world-respected;
creating a substantial infrastructure of support for European
end-users, and establishing international alliances wherever
beneficial to European industry - in other words creating a framework
for success for European semi-conductor suppliers; software suppliers;
tool suppliers and end-users.
The OMI
Software Programme
A major part of the OMI effort
is devoted to the provision of an open, consistent software architecture
that will address the needs of both the general purpose computing
arena and the ‘system on a chip’ world of deeply embedded
applications. OMI software projects focus on operating systems,
programming language support and environments, low level emulation
interfaces, software program debugging and benchmarking. Projects
working in these areas have produced significant results, many
of which are available today as world-class products. In this
article we look at what has been happening in two of these areas
- operating systems and programming languages.
Operating
Systems
The first micro kernel project
was started in 1992 - led by Chorus Systems with support from
Novell, Alcatel, Olivetti, Siemens and SGS-Thomson - to develop
an open micro kernel operating system for the industry-standard
UNIX world. This was followed by a second project to take the
micro kernel operating system ‘down stream’ to the
embedded systems world. Led by Chorus again, but this time joined
by Alcatel, Ericsson, Philips, Siemens, AMD and Matra, the results
became the first real-time micro kernel operating system with
open and compatible standard interfaces. Today Chorus/ClassiX
- is a world leader, beating US competition because of its excellent
pedigree and fit to user requirements.
A third project is now working
to combine the results of the previous projects into a standard
framework for building operating systems out of re-usable system
software components. Object-oriented programming is without doubt
the key technology that is ushering embedded systems into the
modern computing world. It allows developers to assemble software
from off-the-shelf components ,and to access their services without
having to know how the inside of objects actually works, This
recent OMI project integrates the latest object software trends,
CORBA and Java, with the Chorus real-time micro kernel technology.
Further down the hierarchy
of embedded applications, the EOS operating system from one of
Italy’s largest software engineering houses, Etnoteam, provides
real-time management of embedded applications in areas such as
the automotive sector and the consumer market. EOS is a very
small, portable and scalable operating system that can be easily
tailored to meet individual application needs - especially where
size, cost and resource efficiency are critical. The first EOS
project, led by Etnoteam with support from companies such as
Thomson, Renault and Electrolux, was started in 1993. The resulting
embedded operating system and development environment enabled
tiny applications to be made that could then be easily ported
between different microprocessors. A current project is
producing a safety-critical version of EOS focused on the needs
of the transportation sector.
The object-oriented version
of the Chorus micro kernel and the safety-critical version of
EOS being developed within OMI projects are opening up the market
still further for European leading-edge software.
Programming
languages and support
Programming language support
has been the focus of many OMI software projects. One of the
early projects was initiated in 1992 to provide a consistent
set of compilers and programming tools .for developing applications
for both general purpose computing and embedded systems environments.
The focus of this project, which included companies such as the
UK’s Defence Research Agency, the Open Software Foundation
(OSF), Bull and ADA specialists DDC-I from Denmark, was the provision
of an application development environment that would enable true
portability to exist - a high priority within the computing industry
for many years. The project started with the work undertaken
by the OSF Research Institute in Grenoble, to provide an architecture
neutral development framework (ANDF) which would enable applications
to be developed that would run on any micro-processor with no
code modifications. The original concept for ANDF came from the
R&D arm of the UK Ministry of Defence, the Defence Research
Agency. Both these organisations had focused their work on the
C programming language. The OMI project extended the ANDF concept
to other languages such as ADA and FORTRAN.
Subsequent projects expanded
on the ANDF theme and today one of the key results is visible
at The Open Group, a vendor-neutral, international consortium
of more than 200 members from both the supply side and the buy
side of the IT industry, whose combined IT budget is in excess
of $55 billion annually. The Open Group’s Open Software
Registry uses the results of these ANDF-based projects to check-out
the usage and abusage of the application programming interfaces
(APIs) used in software. How APIs are used in software development
is one of the main factors in determining how portable the software
will be. The Open Software Registry contains details of software
from hundreds of suppliers - the portability of each application
checked out by the ANDF-based CI-Report tool which physically
examines the source-code.
Another result of these ANDF
projects is about to come to market in the shape of a software
portability assessment methodology. On the one hand, this methodology
uses CI-Report to evaluate the API and language aspects of an
application’ and on the other it assess the processes in
place within an organisation for developing or porting an application.
The overall assessment, which conforms to the IS0 standard for
software quality process improvements (SPICE) and with the US
Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model
(CMM), provides software developers with a clear picture of the
effort needed to port software, as well as indications of where
and how their existing processes can be improved. It can also
be used as a procurement tool to assess the true portability
of
software prior to purchase - a very attractive option for major
corporations and government agencies. In fact, the methodology
has already been trialed very successfully by organisations such
as NATO, the US DOD, Siemens, the Italian telecoms giant Italtel
and a leading UK bank. For more details check out The Open Group’s
Web site at http://www.opensoftware.com/spam
Current OMI projects are now
bringing the ANDF technology to the embedded systems world -
providing the ability to port applications easily from one embedded
processor to another - reducing development effort and enabling
improved code re-use, a critical requirement from all industrial
sectors in an attempt to alleviate the ever increasing software
to hardware cost ratios. A version of ANDF specifically for the
safety-critical
world is also in the pipeline.
In addition to the ANDF technology,
OMI has projects focusing on making the more traditional programming
languages such as ADA, C and C++ suitable for the safety-critical
world. Much work is also being done by OMI projects to improve
the capabilities of
languages traditionally used to model and simulate the behaviour
of embedded applications. Object-oriented extensions to industry
standard modelling languages such as VHDL for example is part
of a project being undertaken by companies such as Telefonica
from Spain; Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and Italtel as well
as LEDA from France and the Swedish arm of one of the worlds
largest Electronic Design Automation (EDA) companies, Cadence.
The way
forward
The move towards an object-based
architecture benefits engineers and companies tremendously. By
removing concerns about architectural constraints, management
can focus on process improvements. Future advanced system software
architectures for embedded systems will behave like unified architectures
rather than isolated islands that need to be integrated together.
The European Union R&D
programmes run in four-year cycles. The next - known as the Fifth
Framework - is scheduled to start at the beginning of 1999. Software
technologies for the microprocessor industry will continue to
be a significant focus of the OMI programme - enabling the European
industry to compete effectively in the software that makes the
world go round.
0MI Bulletins are occasional
leaflets published by the OMI PROMISE project.
0MI,The Open Microprocessor systems Initiative, is a programme
set up by the European Information Technology industry and the
European Commission in the framework of Esprit the European strategic
Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology. |