Microsoft Corp has licensed real-time control specialist Nematron Corp to write and distribute its own version of the NT hardware abstraction layer. Nematron plans to tune the interrupts, cache management and memory handling to improve the real-time performance of its Hyperkernel real-time subsystem for NT, first on iAPX-86-based systems and then on Digital Equipment Corp Alpha RISC chips. Normally a company such as Nematron would rely on the standard hardware abstraction layer provided for the microprocessor it was using, but creating a specialized abstraction layer is well within the NT rule book, since it won’t detract from standard NT applications running on a system using the custom layer. No doubt mindful that NT has started to make an impact in the real-time and embedded control market, Redmond has given Nematron access to the standard NT hardware abstraction layer source code to craft its own from.
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