Taylor Hobson Limited

Mentor Graphics' Nucleus RTOS Chosen by Taylor Hobson for World Class Metrology Instrumentation

Mentor Graphics' Nucleus embedded software was chosen by Taylor Hobson Limited (Leicester, England) for implementation in the company's newest metrology instrument: the Form Talysurf Intra. Taylor Hobson has taken advantage of an array of tightly integrated products within Nucleus RTOS to develop the portable PDA processor unit.

The Form Talysurf Intra is a surface metrology instrument that allows engineers to measure surface roughness, waviness and form. There are several components that make up this state of the art device. One of those components is a control device with a color VGA touch screen in which Nucleus software was implemented. By using Inflexion UI and GUI Services, engineers at Taylor Hobson developed a menu-driven touch screen application that supplies users with control of the measuring equipment component of the Form Talysurf Intra. It provides simple control of the measuring equipment through a series of straightforward menus. These menus allow rapid measurement, calibration, set-up and control of the instrument. In addition to control of the Form Talysurf Intra, the device also allows analysis of results either on screen or via an optional printer.

Dr. Mike Mills, chief software engineer of Taylor Hobson's Intra product, stated that the Inflexion UI and GUI Services software was a key factor in completing the project on time. The Windowing toolkit was used extensively to develop the touch screen component of the Intra product. Another component of Inflexion UI and GUI Services, the graphics rendering services, contains line drawing functions that were successfully utilized to provide graphical representation of the data gathered by the instrument. In addition, the Intra product used Nucleus File System Services, Mentor’s DOS compatible file system, to support both internal and external Flash memory devices.

Mentor Graphics supplies a wide variety of tightly integrated Nucleus products. Developers at Taylor Hobson have used many of the Nucleus products in their device including the Nucleus RTOS kernel; Nucleus Networking Services, a full-featured TCP/IP protocol stack; Nucleus File System Services, an MS-DOS compatible file system; and Inflexion UI and GUI Services, a portable graphical user interface building software package. Each of these high performance products have been designed to be fully scalable to the specific application in which it is being employed. In this case, Taylor Hobson capitalized on Nucleus RTOS’s small memory footprint and ease of use to design the touch screen application for their device.