Druck LTD
"Nucleus PLUS has given our instrument the reliable 'heart' that it needs to compete and perform in a challenging market place. Aviation support customers are some of the most demanding people I have ever met, and only the best is good enough. Our thanks to the Mentor Graphics team for a great product, which undoubtedly assisted us to make the development of our product happen,"
--Peter McCarthy, engineering group leader, ADTS Development, Druck Limited.
Nucleus RTOS helps passengers fly safely with Druck's ADTS 505 Hand Terminal
Established in 1972, Druck is a world leader in the application of advanced silicon sensing technologies for pressure measurement and control. Druck manufactures a wide range of pressure sensors, portable calibrators, pressure standards and Aviation Ground Support Equipment.
The Air Data Test Set (ADTS) 505 remote hand terminal
The ADTS 505 is a remote hand terminal specifically designed for use with civil aircraft. It allows aircraft technicians to check the performance and readout of vital instrumentation in an aircraft cockpit. The ADTS 505 hand set helps measure the 
Technicians must perform a ground test before an aircraft takes off. The purpose of the test is to check the performance and readout of the altitude, rate of climb and air speed indicators within the cockpit instrumentation. The ADTS 505 hand terminal has transformed what was a time-consuming two-man operation (one technician outside with the ADTS 505 and the other in the cockpit) into a simple one-man operation. A test technician sits in the cockpit with the terminal, passing the cable through the cockpit window to determine the necessary measurements. He is now in full control of the "flight pressures" required for any test scenario for anything from a Cessna to a Concorde aircraft.
Nucleus selected for the ADTS 505 hand terminal
Developers at Druck set out to find a real-time operating system (RTOS) to build their ADTS 505 hand terminal. They realized that if a multitasking operating system was to provide application programmers with ease of use, flexibility to support any interface expansion, and be highly reliable, the source code would have to be carefully crafted and tested. Also, the RTOS needed to fit well with the development and debugging environment that they planned to use.
The most serious constraint was project timescale. Druck developers had important deadlines to make and an uncomfortably short development window. They had to seriously look at what RTOS vendors had to offer that could support and enhance this type of project.
Druck asked a contractor to perform a market sweep of suitable vendor products and report the findings. The factors reviewed wer evidence of solid history of support for the Mortorola 86332 core, facilities and functions, practicality of tools support, evidence of good customer base and supprt structure, overal package costs, royalty requirements and source-code availability. Mentor Graphics' Nucleus PLUS real-time kernel scored well in all these areas and came out clearly as a strong contender.
About Nucleus software
The Nulceus PLUS kernel provides efficient, high performance task management, inter-task communication, inter-task synchronization, memory management, and component query features. Optimizations in system clock, interrupt and compiler register usage are only part of the advanced features provided by Nucleus PLUS. The kernel handles difficult issues such as priority inversion while minimizing the interrupt latency to a few 
Mentor Graphics does not charge run-time royalties for its Nucleus software and developers receive the source code, documentation and other support benefits so they can understand its quality design. Nucleus is highly portable; it has been optimized and supported for hundreds of different embedded CPU and development tool combinations and is delivered working, out-of-the-box, on the developer's choice of reference design hardware.
Complimenting the base of Nucleus real-time kernels are services for networking and Internet protocols, a file system, a graphical user interface, and easy-to-use services for World Wide Web access. The complete family of Nucleus embedded software is designed around a solid micro-kernel architecture; one that maximizes performance, robustness and scalability. Since real-time development requires more than just traditional software tools, Mentor Graphics' has a full suite of Nucleus-specific tools that are optimized to assist users to develop Nucleus applications.