Freescale Semiconductor and Wind River Systems have announced a strategic alliance aimed at helping customers enhance system performance, reduce cost and accelerate time to market.
Freescale Semiconductor and Wind River Systems have announced a strategic alliance aimed at helping customers enhance system performance, reduce cost and accelerate time to market. The alliance unites the breadth and depth of each company’s products and technologies to enable optimised solutions designed to offer an easy, productive ‘out-of-the-box’ experience for embedded system and device software developers. ‘The ultimate goal of this alliance is simple: offer our mutual customers easier-to-use, better integrated and higher performance solutions than competitive stand-alone offerings’, said David Perkins, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Freescale’s Networking and Computing Systems Group.

‘Freescale and Wind River have a long and fruitful history of collaboration’.

‘This alliance deepens our partnership to enable a comprehensive set of highly integrated, performance-optimised solutions for home, enterprise, and networking and communications infrastructure markets’.

A cornerstone of the alliance is to provide extensive support for Freescale’s PowerQUICC communications processors and host processors containing PowerPC cores.

This support will be delivered across Wind River’s broad portfolio of device software optimisation (DSO) solutions, including its VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) platforms, carrier-grade Linux platforms and eclipse-based development suite.

Customers can leverage Wind River’s industry-leading DSO solutions throughout the full range of Freescale’s communications processors, enabling a common, scalable development environment for applications of any size or complexity.

The alliance is designed to combine Wind River’s run-time software platforms and Freescale’s hardware acceleration architectures, including integrated security engines, to provide performance-optimised solutions for customers in the communications and networking markets.

Target applications for the joint solutions include wireline and wireless communications infrastructure, enterprise switching and routing, SOHO and home networking and high-end industrial control.

‘As undisputed market leaders, Wind River and Freescale can jointly leverage the scale and breadth of our products, capabilities and market presence to deliver easy-to-use solutions our customers require’, said Ken Klein, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Office at Wind River.

‘Customers increasingly demand whole-product solutions that tightly integrate silicon, operating systems, tools, boards and applications and are easy to use and deploy’.

‘This alliance will expedite the delivery of these integrated solutions and enhance our customers’ time to market’.

To underscore the momentum of their alliance, Freescale and Wind River joined forces at the 2006 Worldwide User Conference on a demonstration milestone.

The two companies are showcasing the first public demonstration of Freescale’s dual-core MPC8641D processor running the VxWorks RTOS on both cores in concert with Wind River’s innovative multicore debugger capabilities.

The MPC8641D contains two high-performance e600 PowerPC cores unified in a system-on-chip architecture that combines high-speed interconnects, such as Serial RapidIO interconnect technology, gigabit Ethernet and PCI Express.