CAMBRIDGE, UK -- March 17, 2003 -- eCosCentric Limited, the eCos and RedBoot experts, working in conjunction with the eCos maintainers, today announced the release of eCos 2.0 Beta, the latest version of the eCos real-time operating system. This is a substantial release which reinforces eCos as the premier royalty-free open source RTOS.

Available for free download and on CD-ROM, eCos 2.0 Beta supports more than 80 publically available evaluation and development platforms. Architectural support now covers ARM (including StrongARM and XScale), SuperH, Intel x86 (IA32), PowerPC, MIPS, Matsushita AM3x, Motorola 68K/Coldfire, SPARC, Hitachi H8/300H and NEC V850.

System enhancements in the new release include:

• RedBoot, the open source bootstrap and debug firmware based on eCos
• A choice of TCP/IP stacks including options for BOOTP/DHCP, DNS, TFTP/FTP, SNMP, IPv6 and HTTPD
• RAM, ROM and flash file systems
• Power management support
• USB slave support
• A POSIX-compatible API
• Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support

eCos 2.0 Beta is also the first release under a new license which provides compatibility with the well-known GNU General Public License (GPL) while also allowing application source code to remain proprietary.

"We are delighted to be supporting the ongoing development of eCos and RedBoot, and our customers are equally delighted with the results." said Alex Schuilenburg, Managing Director at eCosCentric. "The combination of eCos, RedBoot and our commercial development and support offerings allows OEMs and semiconductor manufacturers to take maximum advantage of the stability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness afforded by open source software in their embedded designs."

Alongside eCos 2.0 Beta, eCosCentric is providing a set of pre-built GNU toolchains for all the major architectures supported by eCos and RedBoot. Embedded software developers now have an easy route to evaluate eCos on both Windows and Linux hosts for the target platform of their choice. "Many eCos users have experienced difficulties in generating the toolchains necessary to build and debug eCos applications" said Jonathan Larmour, Chief eCos Maintainer and eCosCentric staff member. "So we decided to make things easier."

Founded in April 2002, eCosCentric is the leading provider of eCos and RedBoot support, development and consulting services worldwide. Staffed by the original eCos creators and highly experienced embedded system and software engineers, eCosCentric provides complete solutions consisting of run-time systems and complementary host tools.

For further details, please visit eCosCentric on the web at http://www.ecoscentric.com.