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Even with so many commercially available run-time solutions, more than
50 percent of all embedded projects today are built using in-house
proprietary, or "roll your own", real-time technologies (Venture
Development Corporation). The original eCos developers (Cygnus Solutions which later became part of Red Hat) partnered with microprocessor vendors
and embedded product manufacturing companies to develop eCos around
the requirement of an open, technically advanced run-time solution.
eCos was designed to address the following fundamental issues that
force embedded product manufacturing companies to develop their own
run-time technologies:
- Cost - eCos is royalty free and license cost free. It is
portable across chip architectures, which makes it well-suited for
software developers of high-volume applications in consumer
electronics, telecommunications, automotive and other deeply embedded
applications,
- Control - eCos is an open-source run-time
technology which fosters innovation, reduces risk, and places
customers in control of their application specific content by enabling
programmers on the Internet to read, redistribute, and modify the
source code for eCos.
- Technical Fit - eCos provides source-level
configuration (more than 200 configuration points) to exactly match
application needs and is tightly integrated with the latest version of
GNUPro tools, including highly optimized compilation technology,
multi-threaded debugging, graphical configuration, test suites, etc.
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