Wind River's Tornado — The Most Dramatic Advance in Embedded Systems Technology in 10 Years — For UNIX and Windows; Target Resource Constraints No Longer an Issue for Powerful Development Tools

Business Wire, Sept 4, 1995

ALAMEDA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 4, 1995--Wind River Systems (NASDAQ:WIND) today introduced Tornado -- the first open and extensible environment for developing real-time and embedded systems -- for UNIX and Windows.

Tornado provides embedded system developers with a complete set of powerful, intuitive, graphical tools to improve productivity. From low-end, deeply-embedded communications and office automation products to high-end VME applications such as real-time industrial automation and traffic control systems, Tornado will enable developers to get high-quality products to market faster.

"With Tornado, embedded system developers will have the same fully integrated visual programming environment for any project regardless of target memory constraints, resource limitations, or real-time requirements," said David Larrimore, vice president of marketing for Wind River Systems. "Companies producing a variety of embedded products -- each with special development requirements -- will dramatically improve their effectiveness and productivity by choosing Tornado as their standard corporate-wide development environment."

Tornado - A New Standard for Embedded Development

Embedded software can be extremely complex, with hundreds of system objects all co-existing and operating both synchronously and asynchronously. The embedded software developer must often meet severe memory and I/O constraints while at the same time trying to increase productivity and improve performance. Until now, most of the tools available to handle this complexity have been stand-alone and text-based.

Tornado provides the embedded developer a new interactive cross-development environment comprised of coordinated tools that incur little or no overhead in target resources. This new development environment consists of three integrated components: the Tornado tool suite, a set of powerful tools and utilities on both the host and the target; VxWorks, the industry's most powerful and scalable real-time operating system, which executes on the embedded target processor; and a full range of communications options such as Ethernet, serial line, ICE or ROM emulator for the target connection to the host.

"Wind River's products have always defined the state-of-the-art for embedded and real-time development," said Wind River chairman and co-founder Jerry Fiddler. "Tornado's highly-integrated, scalable and open architecture continues this trend by giving developers access to the market's most powerful tools, and the ability to easily adapt the development environment to the problem at hand."

A key differentiator is Tornado's integrated target and tool management facility, which is used to access all host tools, make connections to the targets, monitor active development sessions and choose configuration options.

Tornado Tool Suite - All Tools For All Targets

Unique to Tornado is the fact that all the development tools can be utilized at any stage of application development, with any level of target system resources, and over any physical connection. The Tornado tool suite offers a host-based shell and incremental linking loader allowing powerful development functionality without requiring target resources. A host-based browser is available for point-and-click monitoring of all aspects of the target system. The CrossWind debugger supports task aware and system level debugging, and mixed source and assembly displays. The new WindConfig tool allows the run-time system to be configured and built graphically. Finally, a target server is available for performing object module and symbol-table manipulations entirely on the host as well as handling the details of connection to the target over any physical media.

The philosophy that underlies this new architecture is a careful abstraction of the essential services that must be performed on the target. These services are encapsulated in Tornado's single target-resident component, the target agent. This scalable agent represents all of the Tornado tools on the target system.

The Tornado tools interact with each other and with the target system. They also have the sophisticated WindPower GUI for point-and-click ease of use, including pull-down menus, scroll bars and buttons -- eliminating dependency on command-line interfaces.

"Tornado brings a new level of functionality and productivity to the embedded market. Its integrated and extensible framework gives developers the opportunity to plug-in and use the diverse set of tools necessary to bring today's complex projects to market," said Jim Reinhart, Motorola's Manager of Embedded Systems Engineering and Marketing. "We are very excited that Motorola processors are featured in the first wave of Tornado -- teaming together to offer a great platform for the embedded system developer."

Published APIs for A Truly Open Extensible Plug-In Environment

To provide both third-party vendors and customers with an open extensible development environment, Tornado supports a wide variety of published application programming interfaces (APIs). These APIs facilitate easy third-party tool integration, greater customization of the user interface, additional connection strategies, and development of application-specific tools.