Wind River Unveils Strategy Enabling Life Cycle Support For Reconfigurable Computing Systems; New Embedded System Possibilities for Designs Using CPUs & FPGAs.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

Embedded Systems Conference

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 10, 2001

Wind River Systems (Nasdaq:WIND), a leading provider of software and services for connected smart devices, announced today that it intends to offer development tools and runtime support to speed designs of systems containing field programmable gate arrays (FPGA).

This extension to Wind River's existing support for RISC/CISC CPUs provides a complete design capability that allows embedded engineers and system architects to select the optimum programmable silicon building blocks for their application requirements.

An increasing number of embedded designs are closely coupling FPGAs and CPUs. This new class of system known as "reconfigurable computing" allows FPGA hardware to be configured with new functionality after the product has been deployed. In this architecture the CPU typically runs system applications while the FPGA manages other computationally intensive tasks. System designers will now be able to choose from a suite of Wind River products to profile bottlenecks and CPU time-intensive tasks in software, and then migrate these sections of code where appropriate into hardware. To facilitate the combined use of CPU's and FPGA's in reconfigurable computing designs, Wind River is developing new solutions including new hardware reference designs, new hardware bring-up tools, timing and profiling tools, code generation tools, and more. These products will be designed to complement the company's market leading Tornado(R) integrated development environment, (IDE) and VxWorks(R) AE real-time operating system (RTOS). Specific product announcements will be made later this year.

The combination of Wind River technology with partner solutions from Celoxica and Xilinx will set new standards in the industry for embedded system design. Xilinx provides API extensions for VxWorks AE RTOS to facilitate complete control of FPGA content, (see press release dated October 23, 2000) and Celoxica has developed DK1, a "C-to-hardware" design suite that enables direct C-to-hardware synthesis (see press release dated April 10, 2001).

"Wind River recognizes that software and hardware design methodologies are merging," said John Fogelin, vice president and general manager of the Wind River Platforms Business Unit. "As these design techniques move toward similar goals of creating faster, more reliable devices, compatibility issues will remain at the forefront of the challenges for embedded designs. Our support for reconfigurable computing development includes providing tools and solutions for the complete product life cycle from hardware bring-up, through application development and remote upgrade capability for deployed reconfigurable products. Wind River is uniquely positioned to provide every type of embedded software developer -- regardless of the type of silicon building block used -- the tools they need in this challenging and ever expanding market."

A Complete Reconfigurable Platform

Following are some of the components of Wind River's platform to enable reconfigurable computing designs:

-- RTOS - Wind River's VxWorks AE RTOS provides the best runtime environment
for closely coupled CPU and FPGA systems. Extensions to the API are in
development to facilitate the migration of software content from the CPU to an
FPGA, and the Xilinx PAVE API for the VxWorks AE RTOS allows FPGAs to be
reprogrammed in deployed products.

-- Development Tools - Wind River's Tornado IDE is a development platform
integrated with VxWorks which includes graphical project workspace and RTOS
management tools such as an object browser, runtime analysis tools, debuggers
and compilers as well as boot loaders.

-- Firmware and Reference Designs - Wind River's visionWARE design tool, a
hardware/software integration technology, is specifically designed for
developing software that interacts with and controls hardware. visionWARE
accelerates and simplifies writing target diagnostics, initialization code,
speeding development, manufacturing & test processes.

"Through its extensive WindLink(TM) partner program and value chain of products, Wind River is able to provide its customers with a complete design and development solution for customers developing field upgradable applications," said Rich Sevcik, senior vice president of IP cores, service and software, at Xilinx. "We have been very successful in creating best in class solutions for the hardware and software embedded systems developer through our technical collaboration with Wind River."

"We are very pleased to be working with Wind River to support the advent of the FPGA as an important system component in embedded designs," said Jon Treanor, CEO of Celoxica. "DK1 combined with Wind River hardware and tools provides an unprecedented development environment for reconfigurable computing designs."

About Wind River Systems

Wind River, www.windriver.com, is a worldwide leader in embedded software and services for creating connected smart devices. Wind River provides software development tools, real-time operating systems, and advanced connectivity for use in products throughout the Internet, telecommunications and data communications, digital imaging, digital consumer electronics, networking, medical, computer peripherals, automotive, industrial automation and control, and aerospace/defense markets. Wind River is How Smart Things Think(TM). Founded in 1983, Wind River is headquartered in Alameda, California, with operations in sixteen countries worldwide.

Wind River Systems, the Wind River Systems logo, VxWorks, WindLink, Tornado, and How Smart Things Think are registered trademarks of Wind River Systems, Inc. All other registered trademarks or trademarks are property of their respective owners.