[Oberon] Commercial system

[Josef Sedlacek]

Hello together

Let me report for the first time.

In collaboration with the group of prof. Jürg Gutknecht with Dr. Felix 
Friedrich and Florian Negele we have developed a system which carries 
the registered mark

A2 swiss industrial controller (R)

It is a combination of soft and hardware for high reliability 7 days/24 
hours per week operation.
There is a A2CPU processor implemented in a FPGA using DDR3, SRAM and 
Flash. Further there is DVI, Giga Ethernet, Usb Host and other 
"computer" periphery on the board. The interface to the industrial 
process is located on the board as well (making the use of expensive and 
unreliable cables/connectors inside the system unnecessary). It connects 
directly to the high power devices. Industrial field buses (like 
Profibus, Profinet etc.) are provided.
Historically this is a next step after the C2 System which was used some 
thousand times since 1997 all the time with an unchanged hardware based 
on NO and AOS running on an embedded PC. The name A2 came into existence 
during a swiss confederation founded project bringing together high 
quality operating system with the industrial needs.
Now the A2CPU processor allows to use the whole software further. Its 
instruction set compiled with a new Fox-Compiler backend is a reduction 
of the X86 set. The application runs under A2 (AOS) from a 16MB flash.
There are still some details to solve.

We hope to find interested users. The system is highly scalable and can 
be optimized from low price to high performance (because of the high 
speed hardware in FPGA). If you know somebody who could like this then 
tell him please about it.

Otherwise I eat at least one apple a day and hope that A2 can create 
some new jobs.

Best regards

Josef Sedlacek

Am 08.02.2014 03:23, schrieb Douglas G. Danforth:
> After reading the posts concerning the FPGA and Dr Wirth's
> recent work I would think that some enterprising you company
> would take up the torch and build a very inexpensive hardware/
> software system.  Someone like Steve Jobs (Apple).
>
> I mention Apple because I had the privilege of discussing with
> George Pake, in 1975/6, who was director of PARC
> (Palo Alto Research Center) why Xerox had not yet brought
> forth the Alto as a commercial product.  The short of his
> comments were "That's not our charter".
>
> It seems that for ETHZ, it also is not their charter.
>
> Surely there is someone reading this list who would be able
> to garner the resources and personal support necessary to
> confront the 'big guys', or at leased offer a nice alternative.
>
> -Doug Danforth

-- 
Company:  Radiar, Dr. J. Sedlacek, CH-7554 Sent
Tel: +41 (81) 860 06 60
Fax: +41 (81) 860 06 62