Taylor Hobson Limited (Testing Equipment)
"We chose Mentor's Nucleus PLUS real-time kernel for the Intra product because of its embedded graphics capabilities and the availability of pre-written PCMCIA drivers. We had already experienced the quality of the source code, the documentation and the user support on a previous project and had no hesitation in using Nucleus PLUS again in this new demanding role." --Dr. Tony Smith, Intra Project Manager, Taylor Hobson Limited
Mentor Graphics' Nucleus RTOS Chosen by Taylor Hobson for World Class Metrology Instrumentation
Nucleus GRAFIX portable GUI, and other components of Nucleus RTOS, used to develop touchscreen application in PDA 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 Nucleus GRAFIX, Mentor's portable embedded graphical user interface software, 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 Nucleus GRAFIX 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. According to Dr. Mills, one of the key advantages to having this Toolkit was the ability to build and debug the touch screen software on a PC (using the Nucleus GRAFIX MNT toolkit that runs natively on Windows NT) using standard PC development tools. This enabled development to proceed without having the actual target hardware available--a major benefit to the software development team. Another component of Nucleus GRAFIX, 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, ATI'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 PLUS real-time kernel; Nucleus NET, a fullfeatured TCP/IP protocol stack; Nucleus FILE, an MS-DOS compatible file system; Nucleus MNT, Mentor Graphics' prototyping environment that executes natively in Windows NT; and Nucleus GRAFIX, 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 software's small memory footprints and ease of use to design the touch screen application for their device. In addition to the Nucleus products mentioned above, Mentor Graphics also provides development tools, Web-enabling software, profiling tools and much more.