Richard Goering has just published a pretty interesting interview with Jim Ready—one of the industry’s true embedded RTOS pioneers—in his Industry Insights blog. Ready developed VRTX in the early 1980s and his MontaVista team commercialized a version of embedded Linux in the early 2000s so his embedded experience spans more than three decades. What’s not well known is that Ready is now the Cadence CEO’s Chief Technology Advisor for Software and Embedded Systems.
Here are some interview highlights:
- On why the industry needed a MontaVista to pioneer an embedded version of Linux:
“The last thing a large customer wants is the latest version of Linux, with 10 million lines of constantly changing, untested source code. We offered commercialization, support, and enhancements.”
- On the ability of EDA to positively contribute to embedded design:
“Virtual platforms represent an opportunity because the lack of visibility into hardware slows things down. Being able to get drivers done and bring up an OS early is very valuable.”
- On the value of hardware/software co-development to embedded chip design:
“With co-development, you’re building a new chip and you build a virtual platform so the OS guys can get going. Co-design is where you have some notion of what the system is going to do but you haven’t partitioned it yet, or decided what goes into hardware and what goes into software. TLM [transaction level modeling] provides one way to decide how you’re going to partition, and actually try things out.”
See the full interview here.
