Overview

Experise

Advantech's NAPD & BCD Engineering teams have extensive experience developing enabling software for real-time operating systems and carrier-grade linux operating systems. We handle all aspects of hardware-dependent software, freeing our customers to focus critical in-house resources on application layer code that is truly their core value add. Our areas of experise are:

• Operating system board support package development and test for Linux and VxWorks
• Creation of Linux LSPs/BSPs for various OS distributions
• Driver integration and development
• Bootloader porting and test
• BIOS porting, optimisation and enhancements
• Development of diagnostic and test software for full platfrom testing
• Middleware development for service availability building blocks such as OpenHPI
• Strategic partnering with the premier application/middleware software providers in the communications and networking processing markets

Bootloaders & BIOS

Porting of a bootloader to a new hardware platform requires a detailed knowledge of the underlying hardware. This is a service which Advantech provides to alleviate our customer from the investment in time required for such a task.

Our experience extends across x86 and MIPs-based processor architectures and allows us to share intimate porting knowledge with our customer's development teams. With new hardware devices for which no support exists in bootloaders such as U-Boot, the initial development efforts can be quite significant. But once the experience has been acquired and the porting process understood we are able to complete ports to customised hardware platforms in a reasonable time frame.

Drivers & Support Packages

Software engineering excellence depends heavily on relevant previous experience, but nothing illustrates it more than device driver development. In order to write a device driver the developer has to be familiar not only with the target operating system at kernel level but also with all the specialised tools and techniques which may be needed to diagnose unexpected behaviour in the hardware/software interface often at the hardware prototype phase.

Linux Support Packages & Board Support Packages alike rely on binding together the bootloader and drivers with the respective OS distribution which needs to be fully regression tested.

At Advantech we have written a large number of device drivers for a wide variety of hardware devices in particular for Real-Time and Linux environments. The many man years of experience we have gained allow us to deliver working device driversearlyin the overall project timescale. Since this is usually a critical path milestone, it clears the way for other dependent tasks to proceed according to plan.

Service Availability

Service availability is a cornerstone metric consistently used by telecom service providers. Nobody wants the phone system to go down. Internet Protocol data network providers and Enterprise Information Technology departments also share the same concern. Historically, individual equipment providers customize proprietary service availability architectures and feature sets. Each application and hardware platform, then, must be designed to fit with the specific service availability's schema—a counterintuitive process to today's market demands for companies to meet new, aggressive time-to-market goals. Maintaining legacy availability architectures is costly both in amortized and lost opportunity costs.

By adopting and porting standard interfaces for systems requiring high levels of service availability, Advantech is able to provide consistency for OS vendors, application developers and network architects. With modular architectures, built on open standard hardware and software, Advantech contributes to greater reuse and a much quicker turnaround for our customer's new product introductions.

Particluar areas where Advantech has invested engineering resources is in IPMI and HPI. The Service Availability Forums's Hardware Platfrom Interface (HPI) can be considered as an application programming interface for IPMI that allows high-level applications to access hardware information without the complexity of IPMI commands.

One Advantech implementation example is the fully compliant OpenHPI interface support for our MicroTCA Carrier Hub. This is a good example of Advantech's growing expertise in this area.

Carrier Grade OS

Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) is at the center of the telecommunications and networking industries move to open architectures. The initiative started with the vision that communication services can be delivered using open-standard, carrier-grade plat-forms. A Linux kernel with carrier-grade characteristics is an essential building block of platforms and architectures. Since its formation, the CGL working group has produced three versions of a specification to define these required capabilities.

Advantech's hardware and software development teams have a solid working experience with the major CGL OS providers to ensure seamless collaboration and support for implementations on Advantech's MicroTCA, ATCA and Network Application Platforms.