eCosCentric announces eCosPro^® selection by Philips for next generation Nexperia™ Set-top box semiconductor solutions

CAMBRIDGE, UK -- July 13, 2006 -- eCosCentric Limited, the eCos and RedBoot experts and member of Philips Nexperia™ Home Partner Program for Independent Software Vendors, today announced that eCosPro^® has been selected by Philips as the real-time operating system for their next generation Nexperia PNX83xx semiconductor solutions. Reference platforms will be distributed with an eCosPro Starter Kit allowing end-users to rapidly evaluate eCos and begin building applications based upon it. The eCosPro Starter Kit is a commercial grade distribution of the eCos RTOS for deeply embedded systems, including a GNU-based compiler/debugger toolchain, graphical eCos Configuration tool and certified RedBoot binaries.

"Philips selection of eCosPro endorses its robustness and suitability for deployment in the current generation of market leading, high-volume and cost sensitive Nexperia PNX831x based Set-top boxes" said Daniel Morris, Sales & Marketing Director at eCosCentric. "At the same time, this decision liberates Philips from the technical and licensing restrictions of their legacy proprietary RTOS for future Nexperia PNX83xx designs".

"We are always looking to provide our customers with high performing turnkey system solutions which are not only affordable but also fast to design in and easy to use. We are happy to work with eCosCentric that offers us the right performance level and a full development environment that our customers can use on all our system solutions", said Ronald Struik, Partner Program Manager for the Philips Semiconductors business line Set-Top-Box & Home Media devices. "eCosCentric clearly helps us to improve the positioning of our STB2xx turnkey system solutions for the very cost sensitive DVB Set-Top-Box market".

The Nexperia PNX831x series offer straightforward solutions for low cost, but feature-rich digital Set-top boxes (STB) and integrated digital TV (iDTV) systems. Beginning with the STB200 DVB-Terrestrial STB reference design, eCosPro Starter Kits will be distributed with each board (replacing pSOS+ as the de-facto supplied RTOS). Philips customers will be be able to evaluate and deploy eCosPro on the Nexperia PNX8316 architecture. Philips and its IP partners are validating their STB-specific software stacks, including MHP, with eCosPro in readiness for further Nexperia PNX83xx based designs.

eCosCentric also offers a direct upgrade to the full eCosPro Developer's Kit complementing the Starter Kit contents with commercial support & advice, graphical IDE & debugger based on Eclipse, profiling, code coverage and memory allocation debugging tools, and C++ runtime (including Standard Template Library). Third party components certified with eCosPro include a Java Virtual Machine, Graphical User Interfaces, CANOpen and USB 2.0 compliant Host, Device & OTG stacks.

About eCosPro

eCosPro is a stable, fully tested and supported version of the eCos open source real-time operating system and RedBoot bootstrap firmware. The eCosPro Developer's Kit is a distribution of eCosPro which includes prebuilt eCos host tools and compiler toolchains, full documentation, an Eclipse-based integrated development environment to streamline eCos application development, libstdc++ implementation and code optimisation tools.

About eCosCentric

Founded in April 2002, eCosCentric is the leading provider of eCos and RedBoot support, training, development and consulting services worldwide. Staffed by the original eCos creators and highly experienced embedded system and software engineers, eCosCentric provides complete solutions consisting of run-time systems, complementary host tools and certified third party applications.

Nexperia is a trademark of Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.
pSOS+ is a trademark of Wind River Systems, Inc.

For further details visit http://www.ecoscentric.com/ecospro.shtml or contact info@ecoscentric.com for pricing and availability.