On 1st September, Altreonic was officially created as a spin-off of Open License Society [1]. The latter started in 2004 to research a unified systems engineering methodology aiming at trust-worthy systems and products. Formal methods were adopted and tools were developed proving that the methodology actually delivers. After 4 years of intensive research, Altreonic is putting the research into practice. The goal is "Push button high reliability!" for embedded systems.The team is composed of 14 people and headed by Eric Verhulst, a veteran guru in real-time multi-processor operating systems and embedded systems research and development. It's first product, the Virtuoso distributed RTOS, was acquired in 2001 by Wind River Systems.
High reliability is often seen as an extra characteristic of the system or of the product requiring a lot of extra cost and effort to develop it. At Altreonic we believe that it doesn't require more development effort provided the development process is right and provided trustworthy components are used. Altreonic provides the two in an integrated way.
The OpenCookbook environment acts like a web based on-line project support tool, allowing companies to cover from requirements and specifications till final product. The OpenCookbook is the basis and turned into a company specific cookbook and design wizard supporting the engineers as well as the project managers on a continuous and iterative basis.
In parallel Altreonic's offers OpenVE, a powerful visual modeling and simulation environment for developing real-time embedded application software. Applications are defined, template code generated and runtime traces allow to visually profile the application. This environment is available for Windows and Linux and includes system simulation on the host system. At the core it is a very compact but scalable distributed Real-Time Operating System, called OpenComRTOS. As it is the key component, it was formally developed and verified, all available under an "Open License". OpenComRTOS is very scalable, supporting from single microcontrollers to distributed networks. The code size is only 5 KB and can be reduced to about 1 KB. Still it supports system wide Events, Semaphores, FIFO queues, Ports, Resources, Memory Pools and a generic entity called a "Hub". This allows the user to add application specific services without a need to change the kernel. Current ports include: Melexis MLX16, Atmel AVR, Xilinx MicroBlaze and LEON3. ARM and PowerPC are planned as well.
Altreonic is complementing these offering with training and engineering services. For more information, contact us at info.request @ altreonic.com