Thomson-CSF SA’s Cetia SA and British subsystem supplier Radstone Technology Plc say they are three months away from delivering a PowerPC 603-based single-board VME computer for industrial, embedded and control applications. Radstone is doing the main VME board design and is working on converting Windows NT to the board; Cetia is handling some of the graphics hardware and is working on moving the LynxOS real-time operating system and Uni/XT – its AIX implementation – over. Cetia has an AIX licence from IBM Corp and says it has shipped 1,000 PowerPC601 VME boxes running the operating system. Unlike Motorola Inc, which is positioning its PowerStack AIX boxes against IBM’s mainstream RS/6000 business, Cetia is content to use AIX within its traditional real-time markets, says Pierre Ravot, the company’s vice-president of marketing. While AIX is not ideal for exacting real-time work, Cetia gets around this by mixing boards running LynxOS and Uni/XT within the same chassis, or crate. Ravot says Cetia will cluster up to nine processors in the same crate, with the highly time-sensitive work being handled by LynxOS processors. The two companies will offer the identical products, dubbed either the PowerEngine CVME603 or PME PPC603 depending on which side of the channel you buy. The boards use a 66MHz 603, with between 8Mb and 128Mb of memory, 512Kb of system ROM, Ethernet and fast Small Computer Systems Interface-2, parallel and floppy port, 16-bit audio port, microphone-headset port and two PMC slots. A 604-based part is also in the works. Radstone is marketing the board as a more general-purpose engine, hence its interest in Windows NT. It is also looking at developing a number of Peripheral Component Interconnect mezzanine boards carrying circuitry of interest to specific market sectors. Radstone, which was for 30 years the microsystems and memory division of Plessey Co Plc, was bought by its management and a group of investors, and floated its shares on the London Stock Exchange in early 1994. The company is based in Towcester, Northamptonshire and does $40m a year. This is not the first time Radstone and Cetia have co-operated – the UK company builds a ruggedised version of Cetia’s existing PowerPC 601-based board.
