CAMBRIDGE, UK -- May 20, 2003 -- eCosCentric Limited, the eCos and RedBoot experts, working in conjunction with the eCos maintainers, today announced the release of eCos 2.0, the latest version of the eCos real-time operating system. This is a fully-featured release of the world's premier royalty-free open source RTOS. It delivers a stable code base for the deployment of eCos across a broad range of embedded systems.

Available for free download and on CD-ROM, eCos 2.0 supports a total of 74 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, Renesas H8/300H and NEC V850.

System enhancements in the 2.0 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

"This is an important milestone in the evolution of eCos - the first major release since strategic development was divested from Red Hat." said Alex Schuilenburg, Managing Director at eCosCentric. "Deployment of eCos and RedBoot continues to grow as OEMs and semiconductor manufacturers make the switch to royalty-free open source solutions. Our commercial development and support offerings give developers the confidence to choose eCos and avoid the licensing costs of alternative technologies."

"We have worked hard on improving the installation experience for the 2.0 final release." said John Dallaway, eCos Maintainer and Operations Director at eCosCentric. "All the tools you need to evaluate eCos are installed directly from the CD-ROM and need no further configuration."

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.