Embedded Systems Design Europe - October 2007 - (Page 9)

news MontaVista CEO looks for acquisitions in Europe Tom Kelly, chairman and CEO of embedded Linux operating system provider MontaVista Software Inc. was in Europe recently to do some shopping. Kelly said that he felt Europe was under-presented in MontaVista’s sales and that he was on the look out for one or more acquisitions that would bolster the company’s presence here. This is not MontaVista’s ﬁrst move to build itself up in Europe. In May 2007 the company announced it was expanding its presence in Europe by opening ofﬁces and strengthening its ﬁeld operations team in Germany, in Finland and in the United Kingdom. In April 2007, MontaVista acquired two U.K.-based companies – see www. eetimes.eu/199200991. MontaVista (Santa Clara, Calif.) is privately held with NTT Docomo, NEC, Mitsubishi Electric, and Siemens as investors. As with most privatelyheld companies, Kelly declined to quantify the company’s revenues or proﬁts. “We’ve no need to raise capital,” said Kelly indicating that the company has no imminent plans for an initial public offering of shares. “I’m over here looking at some inorganic growth,” he added. “I’m looking to invest here.” It is thought Kelly’s latest acquisition interests may be in France. Kelly added that while MontaVista is not in need of money and can contemplate some acquisitions it, is not likely to make a big consolidatory merger. He said there are small, productive software groups in Europe that might look like good value. Kelly added that some small groups have big customers and the right acquisition could boost European sales for MontaVista Kelly said that MontaVista’s sales break down to be roughly 25 percent in Europe versus 40 percent in North America and 35 percent in Asia. “I think Europe should be about one third of sales, it should be roughly one third, one third, one third,” he said. ■ Embedded processor virtualization IP specialist Trango Virtual Processors (Grenoble, France) has joined the partner program of MontaVista Software Inc. Trango Hipervisor is claimed to offer OEMs and ODMs the ability to design systems that deliver the beneﬁts of GPL software while ensuring that proprietary code is strictly isolated and protected. Ready: multiprocessing technology provides opportunity Jim Ready is chief technology ofﬁcer of Montavista Software Inc. He has watched numerous embedded software developments come and go but sees the move to multiprocessing as a key change as well as an opportunity. “The era of going faster by going faster has ended,” said Ready. “The thing about hardware was that while there were physical limits to what could be achieved there was Moore’s law always allowing more. Well in terms of speed that’s over and now the burden is moving to software. The hardware may be scalable [in terms of multiprocessor arrays] but how scalable are the software solutions?” Ready said that in some application-speciﬁc areas the software does scale relatively well, for example in areas such as Internet packet processing, networking and security processing “With Cavium and Raza we’re running on 32-way processors. They happen to be MIPS-based.” Ready went on to add that multiprocessing merges into other disciplines such as multithreading, creating virtual processors, virtualization and emulation. The point is well made because, for example, Raza’s most complex chips to date offer 32 threads or virtual CPUs running across 8 MIPS64 cores on a single piece of silicon. “We support ARM11 MP, x86 and MIPS with symmetric multiprocessing. This has the advantage of one [programming] image that runs in parallel. There are also synergies with real-time,” he said. But Ready said there is no silver bullet and most approaches to making the best use of parallelism are a mixture of partial solutions. “There are implications for operating systems and for design and tool sets. You need software to ﬁnd the parallelism. Looking at the language you can see C and C++ are not well suited to exploiting parallelism. But trying to turn a bazillion programmers into multiprocessor experts isn’t going to work.” “Whatever we do with Linux there’s always more to do. ARM and Intel are not at 32-way yet so there is some head-room,” Ready said. Going forward Ready indicated that while increasing support is necessarily being provided in the operating systems it is the development tools that provide the biggest opportunity. “For measuring and optimization there are not enough tools. Developers need instrumentation and analysis tools, memory leak tools, performance proﬁling tools. He also said that there may be existing technology for networking that could be reused in the silicon. CORBA, from the Object Management Group is the acronym for Common Object Request Broker Architecture. It’s a vendor-independent architecture and infrastructure that computer applications use to work together over networks. Some of those solutions could be reinterpreted and re-applied at the silicon level Ready suggested. “There are very few problems that are totally new.” www.embedded.com/europe | embedded systems design europe | OCTOBER 2007 9 009_ESDE.indd 9 12/10/07 10:34:06 http://www.eetimes.eu/199200991 http://www.eetimes.eu/199200991 http://www.embedded.com/europe

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Embedded Systems Design Europe - October 2007

Embedded Systems Design Europe - October 2007 Contents Linux Set to Dominate Torvalds Updates Linux Kernel ARM Establishes Smart Card Foundry Program Emerson Buys Motorola's Embedded Comms Group LynuxWroks and TTTech to Cooperate on Avionics MontaVista CEO Looks for Acquisitions in Europe Ready: Multiprocessing Technology Provides Opportunity Automotive to Drive MCU Market New Supporters Join COM Express Group Analyst Weighs TI Versus Xilinx Versus PicoChip Cover Feature: Embedded Systems Security Has Moved to the Forefront Trace Exposes the Toughest Real-Time Bugs Employ a Secure Flavor of Linux Use an MCU's Low-Power Modes in Foreground/Background Systems Transporting Video Over Wireless Networks New Products Advertising Contacts

Embedded Systems Design Europe - October 2007

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