Mr. Eder, how is the integration of the company planned?
The company will remain in its current form and will continue to supply and support all computer system manufacturers. Real-Time Systems can now draw on Congatec's worldwide resources to promote the global distribution of the Real-Time Hypervisor. RTS Managing Director Gerd Lammers will also remain on board.

What can we expect in terms of technology?
With the RTS hypervisor, different operating systems can be run on a single hardware platform. The continuing strong trend towards multi-core technology and extended real-time capability makes the use of this technology more necessary than ever. With the acquisition, x86 hardware developers, BIOS and firmware engineers can now work closely with hypervisor developers to achieve the best possible real-time performance and determinism. Users in the fields of automation and medical technology in particular will benefit directly from this.

Can you name specific applications in automation?
Thanks to the increasing number of CPUs, customers can work in an increasingly modular way and develop virtual machines as functional modules, which are required for motion control of multiple axes or communication via real-time Ethernet, TSN and many other edge computing tasks, for example. In addition, end users can now also be provided with their own virtual machine for their operating system environment, which they can use exclusively for their specific tasks. For example, to synchronize a machine with the tasks of its multi-vendor factory. Such tasks regularly lie outside the primary functional scope of the OEM's control system and HMI. Nevertheless, OEMs must enable such Industry 4.0 interface functions today.

What distinguishes the RTS hypervisor from competitor solutions?
It runs on any x86 multicore system without any customization and supports all common real-time and general-purpose operating systems. Thanks to the so-called privileged mode for the operation of real-time operating systems, additional latencies due to virtualization are excluded and the hard real-time capability and determinism are retained. It is also easy to install and the existing device drivers, development tools and processes can continue to be used to supplement your own real-time applications with virtual machines for a gateway or an HMI.

No special development tools are required for the hypervisor itself. This makes development particularly secure for RTS users, as they can use the development tools and compilers provided by the manufacturer for each operating system. Due to the clear partitioning, the guest operating systems are usually not assigned emulated devices, but the real existing devices. This means that the existing device drivers can continue to be used without any adaptations.

Congatec has developed the 'Universal IoT Connector' together with other SGET companies. Another field of application for the hypervisor?
It is certainly very interesting to map this gateway logic in a virtual machine, as it can be easily ported. That's why we will of course also offer the Universal IoT Connector as a virtual machine. But this is not a must. Ultimately, customers have to decide for themselves how they want to get their data into the cloud. There are many possible solutions. However, as the UIC is a purely software-based standard to standardize the connection between hardware and cloud, it is predestined to be operated in a virtual machine that does not interfere with the real-time system.