The emerginh Engineered COTS for embedded systems

A change in market dynamics is causing a fundamental paradigm shift in industry's thinking: Instead of continuing to invest precious Research and embedded Development (R&D) resources and dollars to build expensive, special-purpose proprietary systems with the hope that they will never fail, industry leaders are now assuming that there will be hardware and software failures and thus designing systems and applications that continue to provide end-user service in the presence of such failures. State-of-the-art software and related standards have made significant advances in recent years to support sophisticated schemes and quick embedded implementation of highly available applications and services that can run on relatively inexpensive COTS hardware systems. Some significant industry standardization efforts can be found lately....

refer to: http://xtca-systems.com/articles/engineered-cots-network-systems/

Revitalizing the gaming platform

Fortunately, the members of gaming platform recognized the need for mezzanine standards early in the emerging board industry. By the late 1980s, discussions started to standardize a few different mezzanine form factors. First to emerge were S-bus and PCI Mezzanine Cards (PMCs). S-bus was driven by Sun Microsystems while the gaming platform form factor evolved out of an IEEE effort. While neither was a VITA standard, PMC went on to become a widely used mezzanine for 6U cards for VME, gaming platform, Compact PCI, and other form factors.

refer to: http://vita-technologies.com/articles/stacked-standardizing-mezzanine-modules/

Upon operating system developments...

 

Software architects designing critical embedded systems have tough choices to make when selecting an operating system. Decisions can be both simplified and complicated with new framework and platform initiatives coming into being.

Operating systems that control critical embedded systems have many stringent requirements that they must be able to address in order for them to be considered for deployment. There will always be debate about the best operating systems to deploy in critical applications. However, improvements in real-time operating capabilities in Windows and Linux have opened up the door to options in addition to traditional Real-Time Operating Systems(RTOSs).

refer: http://vita-technologies.com/articles/operating-impact-critical-systems/