Design

RTOS accelerates time-to-market for industrial PCs

25th November 2014
Nat Bowers
0

The Digital Factory division of Siemens has chosen Wind River's VxWorks RTOS as the foundation for its market-leading high-performance industrial PCs. The industrial PCs operate in extremely demanding environments, often directly on the plant floor. Because a standard PC operating system does not always fit the requirements of sophisticated industrial applications, Siemens required an RTOS to execute tasks requiring determinism, fast response times and safety.

The company realised that it could eliminate a number of steps in development and significantly reduce costs with a proven commercial RTOS, so VxWorks was chosen to replace Siemens’ in-house-developed OS. In addition to Wind River’s long track record of success in the industrial segment, the company’s deep knowledge of markets like aviation, automotive and defence, where reliability, safety and security are critical, was an important factor in Siemens’ selection of VxWorks.

Anton Sauter, Product Manager, SIMATIC IPC, Siemens, commented: “Using VxWorks versus building and maintaining our own OS has enabled us to accelerate our time-to-market by four months, cut our engineering costs by 50%, and improve the overall productivity of our engineering team. The combination of Wind River industry-leading technology with Siemens’ engineering expertise has resulted in a high-performance industrial PC for today’s high-volume production environments.”

“For two decades, Siemens has been setting the standard for innovative, durable industrial computers. Enabling them to deliver a superior product to market more quickly and gain a competitive edge is extremely rewarding," said Alexander Damisch, Senior Director, Business Development, Wind River. "This is a great example of the trend we’re seeing where companies that originally chose to build are now choosing to buy, migrating from in-house systems to commercial solutions that allow them to focus more on value-added business capabilities instead of maintaining the core platform.”

Wind River is showcasing Siemens technology in its VxWorks demonstrations at SPS IPC Drives this week, in booth 6-305.

Product Spotlight

Upcoming Events

View all events
Newsletter
Latest global electronics news
© Copyright 2024 Electronic Specifier