Houston-based Texas Micro Inc says it’s been awarded three patents on technologies relating to its Fault Resilient PC development program by the US Patent Office. The technologies are employed in a structure and protocol that enable standard computer systems to recover from hardware and software failures without corrupting data or interrupting program continuity. So- called system-directed checkpointing is said to deliver a high level of fault tolerance at a lower cost than traditional methods. Texas Micro is still working on the system, which it says will provide transparent recovery in under a second from hardware faults and most transient software failures, using Intel-based hardware and an unmodified version of Windows NT. No modification or recompilation of applications software will be needed to run the system, it says. The company signed up Hewlett- Packard Co for the technology towards the end of 1997 (CI No 3,286) and says it is willing to license it to other manufacturers. Texas Micro, an industrial computer manufacturer, merged with fault tolerant systems vendor Sequoia Systems Inc back in 1995.
