Vivace Readies for Boom, Mar 02, 2006

There’s an explosion coming to the portable media player and digital display spaces, and Vivace Semiconductor, a semiconductor startup focused on providing next-generation multi-function video processing chips, wants to be at the heart of it.

Linux got a leg up from Freescale Semiconductor Inc. and the China Ministry of Information Industry (MII), which announced this morning plans to jointly establish a lab based in Beijing to develop complete evaluation systems for the open operating system (OS) and PowerPC core.

Although Linux has captured the imagination of embedded-device designers worldwide, commercial operating systems continue to dominate real-time applications. With a multiuser architecture, a non-pre-emptable kernel, and a scheduler based on fairness instead of priority, Linux forced developers to rewrite portions of it or install a second kernel to gain real-time features. Responding to these deficiencies, a dedicated Linux support community has recently delivered an updated kernel that incorporates many time-sensitive features and makes Linux suitable for a larger range of real-time applications.

MEN Mikro Elektronik claims to be one of the first European embedded computer suppliers to join the MontaVista Linux software certification program.

This will allow the German board supplier to develop MontaVista Linux support packages for its ESM embedded system modules, VMEbus and CompactPCI single board computers.