COTS Continuum is a new product architecture from CWCEC Modular Solutions designed to make customers more productive and able to leverage new technologies more quickly and with less risk.

COTS Continuum is an R&D initiative to develop a common software, hardware and mechanical architecture for future CWCEC products.  The architecture will standardize I/O routing and pin-outs, electrical interfaces, APIs to all hardware functionality, and provide a common HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) and User documentation across CWCEC products.  The net result is a common out-of-box experience between product families and next generation products benefiting all users by easing their technology insertions.

The architecture covers three main areas:

1. PCI devices and switched fabric nodes including enumeration, memory mapping and interrupt processing.
2. BIT (Built in Test) framework and routines so that customers can extend BIT to add new or modified tests including application-specific system level BIT functions that are portable between COTS Continuum products.
3. Firmware features such as board initialization and access to recovery mode boot images.  Recovery mode refers to an alternate boot process to recover from an application accidentally over-writing the primary boot code of the board.
4. A device driver programming interface that speeds device driver development and makes devices drivers highly portable across differing product lines.

>> Click here to learn about Continuum Software Architecture

1. Watchdog timers
2. Configuration jumpers
3. Asynchronous and synchronous serial ports
4. Discrete IO
5. Real time clock
6. NVRAM and Flash Memory
7. FPGA configuration
8. The various board reset functions
9. Memory maps
10. PMC/XMC electrical interfaces (voltage, rear I/O pinouts and other optional aspects of applicable PMC and XMC standards).
11. I/O routing

1. Consistent ruggedization levels and qualification criteria
2. Front panel connectors
3. Rear transition modules
4. PWB and mechanical characteristics

>> Click here to learn about Continuum Power Management

Software engineer productivity: Software engineers will be more productive as they need only learn API's once which can then be applied across various CWC products.

Cost reduction of software development: Customers will experience reduced application software development time particularly for infrastructure software that interacts with multiple modules in a system.  Customers can reuse more of their application code in future generations of their products because of the forward and backwards compatibility of COTS Continuum APIs.

Improved competitiveness: Forward and backwards compatibility of software and hardware interfaces mean that customers will have many more options for dropping in next generation COTS products into their system products with minimal risk & cost.

Reduced risks when integrating partner products: Because the COTS Continuum architecture will be extended to CWCEC partners products, interoperability risks in mixed-vendor systems will be dramatically reduced.

CWCEC has been able to draw upon customer feedback from our various business units and over 25 years of embedded computing experience.  This, combined with the ability to commit the R&D funding required for an initiative of this magnitude, CWCEC will be able harmonize the architecture and features of its broad product offerings to maximize interoperable product choices for customers.

No.  CWCEC has been committed to and continues to be committed to open standards.  Software, hardware and mechanical features of COTS Continuum products will continue to follow the open standards that past products have.

The COTS Continuum architecture augments these open standards in a way that brings a new level of productivity to customers using CWCEC COTS Continuum products and compliant partner products.

All the documentation required to interface to COTS Continuum products will be released publicly.  Documentation required to develop COTS Continuum compliant products will be made available to CWCEC partners and to qualified customers.

The architecture will be implemented across all form factors of products - VME64x, VITA 46, VITA 41, cPCI, etc.  The first COTS Continuum products being announced are the VPX6-185 VITA-46 Single Board Computer, CHAMP-AV6 Signal Processing Engine, and CHAMP-FX2 Reconfigurable Computing Engine.  Refer to separate media releases or information on the www.cwcembedded.com website for information about the release dates of the above products.

By default, all future CWCEC COTS products will implement the COTS Continuum architecture.  Some exceptions may exist for minor product lines or product lines with legacy compatibility issues.  More details on which products will or will not adopt the COTS Continuum architecture will be released over time.

CWCEC has developed the COTS Continuum initiative with the objective to offer benefits for all the embedded computing industry.  COTS Continuum evolve the usability of COTS embedded computing products to bring new levels of productivity to customers.