TTE Systems Ltd Industrial CASE Award
TTE Systems Ltd develops and sells the RapidiTTy family of development tools. The tools provide support for the rapid development of embedded systems which have two key characteristics: (1) limited CPU / memory requirements; (2) very predictable timing behaviour. RapidiTTy tools achieve this without the need for (or expense of) a conventional real-time operating system (RTOS).
The RapidiTTy tools target both off-the-shelf processors (ARM7, ARM9, Cortex-M* core) and FPGAs. For FPGAs, the company has developed an extremely flexible "soft" processor core which supports a standard instruction set and is available in the form of full (VHDL) source code.
TTE Systems Ltd launched its first products at the Embedded Systems Show in October 2007. Since then it has made sales in the US, South America and Europe. It has also had great interest from companies in Japan, China and India. So far this year, sales are running at 40x the level which were predicted last year.
The techniques used in RapidiTTy products were developed as a result of 12 years of research into "time triggered" (TT) system architectures in the Embedded Systems Laboratory at the University of Leicester. Several patent applications have been filed in relation to this research programme and TTE Systems Ltd was created by the University (with financial support from the Lachesis Fund) in order to exploit this technology.
One of the projects which contributed to the development of TTE Systems Ltd was an Industrial CASE Award from the Integrated Products Manufacturing KTN. Although this project did not result in generation of technology which was directly exploitable, it did help confirm that use of TT techniques would allow the rapid creation of embedded reliable systems from an appropriate set of components.
