Wind River, provider of embedded multi-core solutions has expanded its Wind River (News - Alert) On-Board Program to provide participating commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) processor board vendors with software tools, documentation and training to develop, test and validate their own unique Embedded Development Kits for the first time.

According to the company, Embedded Development Kits provide customers with processor boards and optimized configurations of Wind River’s market-leading operating systems, development tools, embedded hypervisor and graphics software.

“Software quality assurance has never been more important, or more difficult, and embedded developers are being pressed to deliver products faster than ever,” said Barry Mainz, chief operating officer at Wind River. “With this next phase of the Wind River On-Board Program, our ecosystem of board partners can now leverage our software, automated testing, tools and BSP validation methods to create exponentially more Embedded Development Kits, in turn controlling their costs and diminishing their customers’ development risks while still maintaining supreme reliability and high quality.”

Wind River will enable board vendors to create their own Embedded Development Kits using Wind River’s automated board support package (BSP) validation suite, technical support and training. This will provide customers with access to a larger variety of Embedded Development Kits that integrate with Wind River run-time and tools technologies.

The updated Embedded Development Kits include a number of new features including training and support to enable each board partner to create its own unique Embedded Development Kits.

Board partners will also be able to utilize high-quality Wind River BSP test suites using Wind River Test Management to validate the quality of the partner’s BSP. All test suites are also fully automated and include comprehensive BSP testing, running code through quality assurance scripts.

Once the Embedded Development Kit passes all testing, Wind River will review the test results and approve the software, and the Embedded Development Kit then is ready for inclusion with the partner’s development board.

“Using the Embedded Development Kits have proved instrumental in securing a number of important design wins in the past six months,” said Arlen Nipper, chief technology officer of Eurotech in North America. ”Customers have reacted positively to the outstanding out-of-the-box experience, and have increased confidence that they can achieve their technical and time-to-market requirements with reduced risk as a result. Additionally, by expanding the Wind River On-Board Program we can now utilize Wind River’s automated BSP validation suite, which will allow us to quickly create our own unique Embedded Development Kits and respond more rapidly to customers’ ambitious schedules and requirements.”

Embedded Development Kits from ADLINK, Advantech, Emerson, Eurotech, Intel and Kontron are now available. Additional Embedded Development Kits from Curtiss-Wright (News - Alert), GE, RadiSys and other vendors are expected to be available later in 2011.