A Year in Review

It has been more than a year since our last newsletter and much has happened at Aonix since then.  Our engineers have rolled out significant new products this year including totally new technologies in our Ada, Java™, and TeleUSE product lines.  ObjectAda Raven, the hard real-time safety-critical solution now targets PowerPC on the VxWorks 653 RTOS with support for ARINC 653 multi-partition execution.  PERC Ultra SMP is now available to support the many multicore and multiprocessor systems beginning to proliferate embedded systems in the Military, Aerospace and Telecommunications market.  PERC Pico has been released to address hard real-time and potentially safety critical applications. And TeleUSE now supports 64-bit processors on a number of platforms.

While Aonix has been moving our products dramatically forward, the market has also continued to change and progress.    Back in the January 2007 newsletter, I wrote an article titled Real-Time Java® — Where is it? exploring the embedded market uptake (or lack thereof) of Java™.  At that time, I suggested that the trends were in favor of energized activity in the market for adoption and implementation of real-time Java. While widespread adoption did not take place in 2007, some significant progress has occurred and Java has made its way into real-time embedded application areas where feasibility is absolutely essential. 

What has fed this progress? Standards are coming together. The Java Specification Request for the applicability of Java to Safety Critical Systems, JSR-302 is coming together. Dr. Kelvin Nilsen, Chief Technical Officer at Aonix, and a contributing member of the JSR-302 committee reports that the overall approach is generally agreed by committee members at this point. The expert group is working towards a goal of distributing a draft specification for public review by the end of 2009. 

Early implementations of this emerging standard are now in full production and are being assessed by companies for use in military, commercial avionics, and rail systems that require certification to industry standards such as DO-178B for flight safety. This technology provides a functional subset of the Real Time Specification for Java (RTSJ), enabling much of the code previously compatible with Java Standard Edition (J2SE) virtual machines to execute in a hard real-time environment. Optionally, extensions to the JSR-302 specification enable more direct memory management and traceability analysis than is possible with RTSJ implementations. These extensions are crucial for access to and capture of application execution for certification evidence creation. 

With specifications nearing ratification and implementations of hard real-time virtual machines now coming on the scene, the basic question still remains, “Are more people now using or planning to use real-time Java?” After all, the best planned and implemented technology is not interesting unless engineers are willing and able to use it. To answer that question, I refer to a recently published real-time user survey taken by Venture Development Corporation (VDC) which asked a group of military and aerospace embedded systems developers about the programming languages they currently use and expect to use in the next two years. As expected, due to the limited number of products that address the needs of this audience in past years, 3.2% of respondents currently use Java. However, now that viable product offerings exist, a dramatic shift is seen toward the use of Java over the next two years with 24.6% planning to use Java in subsequent projects. The same study indicates an increase in embedded C++ and C# as well, indicating an overall significant rise in the use of object-oriented and/or safety-oriented technologies for embedded systems where Java is expected to enjoy the greatest growth. Based on the same study, respondents expected to decrease usage of C.

While the report cited above shows significant Java expansion in the military and aerospace sector, additional market segments are also implementing applications using real-time Java from Aonix and other virtual machine vendors. Signalbau Huber, a leading vendor to the transportation industry has implemented an intelligent traffic control system using real-time Java. A large wafer fabrication manufacturer has implemented real-time Java in its production line and is now reporting five nines uptime, a critical asset to its manufacturing profitability.  And ETAS Group, a subsidiary of Bosch and provider to General Motors and other major automotive OEMs, selected  Java for a new line of automotive service diagnostic equipment. 

Java embedded, now with a footprint smaller than half a megabyte and supporting response times of less than 10 microseconds, has become a practical option for real-time embedded systems. With the finalization of JSR-302, a hard real-time Java standard will be in place, enabling Java technology with all of its advantages to control the application from hardware drivers on through to enterprise systems and diagnostics, significantly boosting the intelligence and transparency of computer systems while sharply reducing the cost of development and maintenance. Real-time embedded Java will live long and prosper.