NAPAC (Process Controls)

"First of all, we wanted an operating system that was not linked to a specific hardware platform," comments François Court, the engineer in charge of the RTOS choice within the NAPAC engineering department. "We also wanted easy management of the socketsrelated aspects and to have the PPP protocols at our disposal since our equipment can often be reached only by phone." --François Court, Engineer, NAPAC

A New Technology Based on Nucleus PLUS for the NAPAC's RIO Product Line

Created in 1985, NAPAC has become one of the worldwide leading players in the remote management and process control markets. Headquartered in Paris, with regional offices covering the entire French territory, the company realized a 6.4 million Euros turnover in 2000. NAPAC has clients in more than 40 countries, with products installed on more than 25,000 sites in France and abroad, covering a wide range of application areas such as environmental control, water supply and sewage systems, gas and oil networks, construction, general industry, and more. NAPAC offers a whole range of systems for remotely operating and maintaining equipments, from I/O units to remote terminal units.

A New Technological Choice with Mentor Graphics' Nucleus PLUS Real-Time Kernel

For the previous ranges, NAPAC was using an in-house real-time kernel, developed on the DOS operating system. With this new RIO range, NAPAC decided to make a new technological choice and use an off-the-shelf RTOS (real-time operating system). That is how Mentor Graphics' Nucleus PLUS was selected for the development of the Phenix board, together with a 33Mhz 32 bits NEC processor.

The development of this new product, initialized in 1998, started with the choice of the processor (NEC) and the RTOS. After a first selection, this choice had to be validated by a technical evaluation executed on a test platform based on a NEC processor. As a result of this selection process, NAPAC opted for the Nucleus PLUS kernel on both technical and commercial criteria.

"First of all, we wanted an operating system that was not linked to a specific hardware platform," comments François Court, the engineer in charge of the RTOS choice within the NAPAC engineering department. "We also wanted easy management of the sockets-related aspects and to have the PPP protocols at our disposal since our equipment can often be reached only by phone."

Moreover, the sales policy of Nucleus PLUS perfectly met the needs of NAPAC. The absence of royalties was an advantage for a range of products targeting increasingly wider markets while the availability of source code was interesting for NAPAC: "We wanted to be able to establish in each case if it was better to communicate using TCP/IP or our own protocol, and this was very easy with Nucleus," François Court continues.

The implementation of Nucleus PLUS started in early 2000, and the new RIO product shipments began in July 2001, after a test phase. "We haven't had any problems with Nucleus," concludes François Court. "The product perfectly met our expectations." As far as the future is concerned, the experience acquired around Nucleus PLUS should be leveraged in the future as NAPAC is evaluating the integration of Mentor Graphics' embedded software in the Hermes model of the RIO range. The Hermes model should target more and more volume applications.