MPC Data and Crank Software join forces to offer advanced HMI tools for embedded solutions 11/04/2011

Crank Software Inc. and MPC Data sign software distribution agreement

Trowbridge, UK; Ottawa, ON – April 11, 2011 – Embedded systems integration specialist MPC Data Ltd. and Crank™ Software Inc. , an innovator in embedded graphical user interface (GUI) solutions , announced today that they have signed a software distribution agreement. Under this distribution agreement, MPC Data will act as a reseller for the Crank Storyboard™ Suite throughout Europe and North America.

"We are very excited to see the high level of development expertise and broad OS experience at MPC Data working alongside our Storyboard products. MPC Data will be of great value to our customers in bringing their HMI based embedded products to market,” says Jason Clarke, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Crank Software.

"The compelling combination of our ‘Storyboard-Ready’ board support products, the cross-platform HMI solutions from Crank Software and our extensive Windows Embedded, Linux and QNX knowledge enhances our existing third party software solutions," states Kevin Heawood, Strategic Development Director, MPC Data. "The Crank Storyboard Suite is a very good fit for many of our OEM customer projects with requirements for rapid prototyping and manufacture of UI centric devices."

Crank Storyboard Suite enables UI Designers and Embedded Engineers to quickly and collaboratively prototype, develop and release rich animated user interfaces for embedded devices.

Storyboard allows UI Designers, with no programming experience, to realise their UI designs through import from Adobe Photoshop and do this in parallel with, yet independently from, the Engineers who are working on the coding. Storyboard simplifies the design process, saves valuable time, and leverages the core skills of each valued member of the team.

The latest version of Crank Storyboard Suite supports design and development on Windows, Linux and Apple Mac desktop environments with broad support for Intel, ARM, Renesas SH, QorIQ or MIPS target processors running a variety of OSs including Windows Embedded Compact, embedded Linux, and QNX.

About Crank Software Inc.
Crank Software is an innovator in embedded user interface (UI) solutions. Our products and services enable R&D teams to quickly and collaboratively develop rich animated UIs for resource-constrained embedded devices compared to traditional electronic design automation tools. Today, time is wasted in the development lifecycle because the design goes back and forth between UI designers, user experience designers, and embedded systems engineers. The Crank Storyboard Suite enables stakeholders to work in parallel. Storyboard manages the entire UI lifecycle—from UI design to simulation to being optimized for the device. Storyboard delivers competitive advantage because streamlining the development lifecycle enables companies to get products to market faster, with higher ROI, and lower TCO while delivering a superior customer experience. Visit Crank at www.cranksoftware.com.

MPC Data Limited
Based in Europe and North America, MPC Data is an award winning Microsoft Gold partner providing World Class Embedded Software Solutions and Products to the embedded community focusing on sophisticated Medical, Video Security and Automotive projects for a worldwide customer base. Visit www.mpcdata.com or contact crank@mpcdata.com for more details.

Crank and Storyboard are trademarks of Crank Software Inc.

Contact:
Garry Clarkson
Product Marketing Manager
MPC Data Limited
Phone: +44 1445 710600
Email: crank@mpcdata.com

MPC Data at Embedded World 2011 – Embedded Products and Services for Automotive, Medical and Security Markets 01/02/2011

MPC Data Limited demonstrate a Renesas Electronics MS7724 platform booting a Linux kernel and graphical QT application in less than one second. 22/11/2010

Dusseldorf, 22nd November, 2010 --- Renesas Electronics, a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, and its Platinum Alliance Partner MPC Data Limited have announced a demonstration platform showing a Renesas Electronics MS7724 platform booting a Linux kernel and graphical QT application in less than one second.

The demonstration, which is available at http://www.swiftboot.com, adds support for the popular SH7724 Renesas Electronics 32-bit SuperH microprocessor to MPC Data's swiftBoot offering. The SH7724 is the latest microprocessor from Renesas Electronics’ successful SuperH lineup. Based on the SH4A core, the device operates at 500MHz delivering 900DMIPS and 3.5GFLOPS of performance. It features high performance hardware video processing and graphics acceleration allowing up to 720p video at 30fps, and an integrated LCD control unit. It is the flagship product in the high end of the SuperH portfolio.

Focusing on device specific tuning, MPC Data is able to cold boot to a functional application in less than a second on a broad range of SoCs, development boards and core architectures.

Jonathan Short, MPC Data’s Embedded Linux Business Manager, commented: “Slow boot times are often unacceptable, particularly in consumer and automotive products where users expect almost immediate access to functionality. The extended functionality that we have come to expect from embedded devices often calls for a richly featured operating system such as Linux. Unfortunately, such operating systems come with an additional boot time overhead.

MPC Data offers a range of swiftBoot services that will be able to dramatically decrease the boot time of an embedded Linux device and give users an ‘Instant On’ experience.”

Some of the key market sectors that can benefit from quicker boot times include:

• Portable Navigation - Instant instrumentation feedback
• Video conference system / security systems, in-home display for metering - Fast startup time for application times where startup can be a true selling feature.
• Media Player, Digital Camera – Instant-on user experience and data immediately available to the consumer.
• Power management - The ultimate low power mode is off. swiftBoot can be used as an alternative to complex power management and hibernation modes that can have substantial development costs.
• Industrial - Absolute minimal down time for industrial control embedded devices between reboots, firmware upgrades, reconfiguration etc.
  

Robert Kalman, Marketing Manager of Renesas Electronics Europe’s SuperH team, commented: “In certain applications, some customers have become used to long boot up times. This just serves to make this groundbreaking technological step from MPC Data all the more remarkable. The combination of this software with our SuperH is an ideal and very complete solution that will leave end customers very impressed indeed.”

MPC Data is a leading expert in embedded system boot time enhancement. With its range of swiftBoot engineering services, it has the solution for customers’ devices. Supporting Linux and uClinux on ARM, SuperH, MIPS & Blackfin based silicon. MPC Data’s deep technical knowledge and real world product development experience has enabled the company to gain a deep understanding of how Linux systems boot and how boot times can be optimized for any given platform or device. This, along with their development of benchmarking and profiling tools, allows them to quickly assess the boot process of existing systems and provide accurate estimates on possible speed improvements.

For more detail on swiftBoot products and services see http://www.swiftboot.com

About MPC Data
MPC Data is a leading turnkey design house in complete system and software custom design. MPC Data offers services in hardware and software engineering especially in industrial environments with a strong emphasis on embedded and/or real-time developments. With many years of experience in Windows Embedded, Embedded Linux and RTOS, and thanks to its partnership with Renesas Electronics and other market leading companies, MPC Data is the key partner for OEMs, offering consultation, software/hardware design and integration services from proof of concept to volume production.

Further information on MPC Data can be found at http://www.mpcdata.com

Remarks
All registered trademarks or trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Renesas Electronics Europe
Renesas Electronics Europe with its Business Operations Centre located in Duesseldorf, Germany, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), the world’s number one supplier of microcontrollers and a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions including microcontrollers, SoC solutions and a broad-range of analog and power devices. Renesas Electronics’ European structure is comprised of five dedicated business groups serving the region’s key markets: automotive, communications & consumer, industrial, secure MCU applications, and mobile platforms. The business groups are supported by the Engineering Group, which itself includes the Engineering Design Centre; the European Quality Centre that provides technical support to local customers in Europe; and the European Technology Centre to design leading-edge products specifically for the European market. Further information about Renesas Electronics Europe can be found at: http://www.renesas.eu

Renesas Electronics Europe on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Renesas_Europe

Latest Perst from McObject Delivers Microsoft Silverlight Embedded Database Support with Secure Local Storage 27/01/2010

McObject announce availability of the latest Perst Embedded Database software release for use with Microsoft’s Silverlight technology for building rich Internet applications, and unveiled a demo that shows Perst in a Web-based customer relationship management (CRM) application written in Silverlight.

The CRM demo application can be launched from the McObject Web site, together with a download of the complete demo source code, along with an article that comments extensively on the code to illustrate Perst’s role in this application.

The full press release from McObject can be found here.

It seems what McObject have delivered for Silverlight is pretty unique. In numerous forums lots of people are searching for a database for Silverlight applications. Candidate DBMSs are offered as possible solutions, but until now there has not been anything that could be offered a proven database for Silverlight with an actual reference application in place.

About Perst for Silverlight

Perst is McObject's open source, dual license, object-oriented embedded database system (ODBMS). It is available in one edition developed as an all-Java embedded database, and another implemented in C# (for Microsoft .NET Framework applications).

Perst gives developers the ability to sort, store and retrieve objects in their applications with maximum speed and with low memory and storage overhead, while leveraging the object-oriented paradigm of the C# and Java languages.

With its newly added Silverlight support, Perst for .NET enables Silverlight applications to leverage DBMS features including transactions, a flexible and easy-to-use API, multiple database indexes, garbage collection and more. Uses of Perst with Silverlight include client-side caching, software as a service (SaaS) architectures, and storage of application settings and of data for tables, grids and lists in Web forms. With Perst, clients can also store data from unfinished projects that use Silverlight Web applications.

To enforce security in Silverlight-based Web clients, Perst requires explicit permission from local users before allowing data storage to exceed the maximum 1 megabyte size allowed under the quota. Also for security, the isolated storage feature in Silverlight restricts the Perst-based application to using a sub-tree of the file system for database storage. Developers can also choose to use Perst for transient, memory-only storage in Silverlight applications. 

Find Out More

Contact MPC Data on mcobject@mpcdata.com and visit our McObject Data Management Solutions section for further detains and commercial pricing.

Latest Press Releases:

BSQUARE Schedules Third Quarter 2011 Earnings Conference

BSQUARE Acquires MPC Data Ltd.

MPC Data achieves ISO13485 certification for the design of sophisticated Medical Devices

McObject release eXtremeDB Cluster, a real-time distributed database for embedded devices

MPC Data and Crank Software join forces to offer advanced HMI tools for embedded solutions

MPC Data at Embedded World 2011 – Embedded Products and Services for Automotive, Medical and Security Markets

MPC Data Limited demonstrate a Renesas Electronics MS7724 platform booting a Linux kernel and graphical QT application in less than one second.

Latest Perst from McObject Delivers Microsoft Silverlight Embedded Database Support with Secure Local Storage

MPC Data Brings Support for High Reliability Flash File systems to Texas Instruments DM355 Windows CE6.0 R3 BSP

McObject & MPC Data Partner in European Embedded Markets

MPC Data releases new White Paper Comparing Windows XPe and WES 2009