Customer History

The future of printing technologies lies in multifunction peripherals (MFPs) that combine the functions of printer, scanner, copier, and fax. Industry analysts project that the sales of MFPs will increase 255 percent by 2001, with shipments of such devices expected to exceed 4.6 million per year. The technology behind these devices relies on high-performance imaging controllers.

The Engineering Division of Imaging Technologies Corporation (ITEC), formerly known as PCPI, designs and manufactures embedded controllers and related products for OEMs of printers and imaging devices. Its chief business strategy is to provide OEMs with high-performance products combined with lower overall manufacturing cost, and to produce them quickly. ITEC has chosen Wind River Systems’ Tornado™ development environment and VxWorks® real-time operating system (RTOS) as the best solutions for meeting the stringent demands of increasingly complex MFP design, keeping costs down, and speeding development.

(Inside flap)
Public access to the Internet has created a revolution in the way ideas, facts, and images are communicated. At the same time, technological advances are allowing data and images to be transmitted over communications lines at speeds no one dreamed possible just a few years ago, and have made high-quality printers, faxes, copy machines, and MFPs affordable for individuals as well as for businesses. These developments, in turn, have created an ever-increasing demand for image-rich copy and the means to produce it quickly and economically.

ITEC recognizes that the future of printing technologies lies in digital imaging and in the merging of computers, telecommunications, and office machines. Individual computer peripherals are already being replaced by a new generation of machines known as multifunction peripherals (MFPs) that combine the functions of printer, scanner, copier, and fax, or any combination of these.

ITEC’s latest generation of controllers makes imaging devices like those mentioned above faster and more economical to produce. Currently there are three controller boards in production:

The LaserImage® Series 3 PostScript Controller is targeted for the 6 to 20 page per minute (ppm) monochrome and entry-level color laser markets. It is based on the 100-MHz NEC V_R4300 microprocessor, and is designed to support Adobe® PostScript® 3™ and PCL 6. It has achieved superior benchmarked performance compared to other controllers in its class, yet features a component cost of less than $125. Like all ITEC’s controllers, it can be customized to meet unique specifications. It comes in three different configurations to accommodate the various interfaces used by OEMs. Several additional iterations of the board are due for release in 1998 including a 3 ppm color controller and two monochrome controllers.

The LaserImage 4000 PostScript Controller is designed for the 21 to 75 ppm monochrome and 5 to 20 ppm color laser market, and includes networking support. It is a low-cost 64-bit printer controller based on the NEC V_R series MIPS RISC microprocessors, and can be configured to run at 100, 133, or 167 MHz. The NEC processors give the controller a flexible architecture that allows OEMs to customize the product to meet their specific needs. The controller was designed to satisfy the requirements of a variety of printers with minor modification to the base architecture.

The LaserImage MFP simultaneously manages print, fax, copy, and scan operations for monochrome multifunction devices. It is a low-cost MFP controller which, like the LaserImage 4000, is based on the NEC V_R series microprocessors, available in speeds of 100, 133, and 167 MHz. OEMs can customize the product to meet their specifications, and the controller can meet both present and future MFP needs without expensive redesign. It supports PCL 5e, PCL6, and Adobe PostScript 3. A second MFP controller is in development.

ITEC is an Adobe co-development partner so its original printer controller boards were based on the C-Executive operating kernel provided by Adobe. ITEC’s first MFP controller used a proprietary kernel and ITEC’s engineers quickly realized the need for a more powerful RTOS to coordinate the MFP’s multiple activities including controlling the print engine and front panel, managing multiple PDLs, sending and receiving faxes over the phone network and receiving incoming data from I/O and networking devices via multiple ports. They needed an RTOS that supported priority-based, pre-emptive, real-time multitasking and provided high-speed interrupt service capabilities. "The old RTOS didn’t have the structure to deal with preemptive multitasking and the tools were not robust enough for MFP design, so we started looking into multitasking RTOSes," says Bill Schupp, ITEC’s engineering group manager.

Jeff Johnson, director of software engineering, elaborates: "On the MFP, scan, copy, and fax functions all get processed concurrently. To manage and coordinate all these functions is the greatest challenge of MFP design. So when we made the decision to go to a new system, we looked for a development environment that was up to this challenge, as well as for an OS that was designed for preemptive, priority-driven multiprocessing."

Bill Shupp says, "We considered other systems, but when we brought in Wind River to demonstrate Tornado and VxWorks, we were blown away by tools like WindView™ and VxSim™."

VxWorks supports a full range of features for embedded real-time systems, including fast multitasking, interrupt support, and both preemptive and round-robin scheduling. The microkernel design allows VxWorks to minimize system overhead and respond quickly to external events. Kernel operations are fast and deterministic.

VxWorks also provides efficient intertask communication mechanisms, permitting independent tasks to coordinate their actions within a real-time system. The developer may design applications using shared memory (for simple sharing of data), message queues and pipes for intertask messaging within a CPU, sockets and remote procedure calls for network transparent communication, and signals for exception handling. For controlling critical system resources, VxWorks provides several types of semaphores — binary, counting and mutual exclusion with priority inheritance.

ITEC’s principal engineer Paul Coleman says, "Development cycles are very demanding today, so you need the tools to develop with quality and speed. You don’t have time to reinvent the wheel and do everything from the ground up, so you use as much off-the-shelf as possible. Many companies still write their own RTOSes, but by doing that you’re running the risk of extending the design cycle, which includes the development and the debug time. If you can get an RTOS that’s already debugged and is solid and stable, then that significantly reduces the risk of project delay.

"In the long term, by staying with a single operating system like Wind River’s, the developers get used to the system calls, so that speeds things up for them," says Paul Coleman. "People tend to be more comfortable with a familiar base, and develop on it, and the more familiar it becomes the easier it is to shift code between groups. Also, if every project was doing 100 percent of the code themselves, it would be a waste of resources. You develop your own library of OS-dependent modules that you can reuse on later projects. The result is that over time the work you’ve done once doesn’t have to be done again, and it keeps increasing in value."

ITEC’s conclusion was that VxWorks and Tornado offered everything they needed for designing cutting edge controllers, and more. The decision was further supported by the fact that Adobe, too, was working with Wind River, making Tornado and VxWorks the standard platform for all Adobe PostScript-based printers and other embedded systems.

ITEC’s initial enthusiasm about WindView and VxSim has been borne out by performance.

WindView allows the developer to watch the changing event stream by tracing the execution thread as the operating system switches between tasks. It gives developers the ability to examine the full history of the system, rather than just a snapshot in time. In addition, it allows the interaction of complex event data to be easily analyzed. As the event stream unfolds, icons representing other system events, such as blocking and unblocking on semaphores and message queues, interrupts, and timer expirations are overlaid on this trace. Detailed information on each event is available simply by clicking on the corresponding icon and dragging it into an event inspection window.

"WindView allows us to monitor tasks in real time, and see where all the interrupts are occurring and how the messaging between tasks is handled," explains Bill Schupp. "That’s something you couldn’t get with an emulator even if there had been one available, but at that time there was not even an emulator that supported the NEC V_R 4300 processor."

The VxWorks target simulator, VxSim, is a comprehensive prototyping and simulation tool that assists in the development of high-performance embedded systems like ITEC’s controller boards. VxSim enables application development to begin before hardware is available. When software development depends on having a hardware prototype, sometimes there is only one prototype available and developers must share time on it, which slows down the process considerably. With simulation no hardware is needed, and software developers can work in parallel. Software testing can occur early in the development cycle when errors are less costly to correct.

Johnson comments, "To develop a solution quickly you need to develop hardware and software in parallel. As soon as the hardware is ready, software should already be available to run on it to make sure the hardware is functional and meets your requirements. So getting the OS up generally is the first order of business, and having tools that connect to the OS to allow engineers to develop simple test routines and to dynamically load objects speeds up both the initial hardware development and the software development."

"There’s a saying in the industry, ‘Fast, good, or cheap — pick two,’" says Jeff Johnson. "It means you can’t have all three. One of the toughest things about designing boards is deciding which two of the three you want to go for. Doing two well usually means you have to sacrifice the third. But VxWorks and Tornado reduce costs and reduce design time, at the same time allowing us to put out a quality product. So they enable us to get closer to having all three.

"Saving time on a project means you need fewer engineers and a smaller staff," adds Johnson, "and you reduce the time associated with developing a project. All these are very important economies. The Tornado development environment saves us a significant amount of time, and therefore saves us money."

Since moving to VxWorks and Tornado, ITEC has discovered other strengths in the system. Paul Coleman has been pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to install Ethernet connections. He says, "We’ve used both Ethernet and serial connections on our products, and they were painless to get up and running. My prior experience with other products was much more painful."

Bill Schupp was pleased with the documentation and tutorials. "I didn’t go to the training classes. I worked on the material on a self-study basis and I was up to speed pretty quick. I thought the training materials were well done."

Schupp adds, "Wind River’s libraries are more extensive than the ones we had developed, and we were able to leverage off the work that Wind River had already done. Because we’re able to reuse code and share it across projects a lot more than we did before, we increase productivity and decrease costs. It’s a pleasure to work with an operating system that has an up-to-the-minute toolset."

Another tool much valued by ITEC is NetROM, one of many third-party tools that plug in seamlessly with Tornado through the several APIs provided by Wind River. NetROM 's full TCP/IP protocol stack and multitasking operating system integrate the target system with an Ethernet network via its ROM sockets, without using any target resources. As a result, NetROM transforms any ROM-based target into a network node that is accessible from any host for all cross-development activities. Bill Schupp explains, "NetROM allows us to prototype code very quickly, without having to burn EPROMs. Our development time has been substantially decreased."

Although MFP technology continues to grow, ITEC is confident that with VxWorks and Tornado they are ready meet any design challenges, now and in the future.

**LaserImage is a registered trademark of Imaging Technologies Corporation, Adobe and PostScript are registered trademarks and PostScript 3 is a trademark of Adobe Systems Inc. WindView, VxSim and Tornado are trademarks and VxWorks, Wind River Systems and the Wind River Systems logo are registered trademarks of Wind River Systems, Inc.