Consumer electronic devices based on Java are on their way
If Sun has its way, your coffeemaker will not be the only thing brewing java in the near future. Sun is spearheading a number of initiatives that will put Java into just about everything.
On the hardware side, Sun has designed a line of Java microprocessors, called picoJava, microJava, and UltraJava. It has already started licensing picoJava to a number of other vendors for inclusion in their own products.
Companies that are satisfied with their existing chips, or that want to improve their time to market, are porting the Java Virtual Machine to their own operating system so that it can support Java. If they are willing to use a SPARC or x86 chip for their device or network computer, they can use the JavaOS from Sun. In addition, a large number of vendors are planning on porting JavaOS to just about every platform imaginable.
Java chips get real
One of the key factors driving Sun into the Java chip business is the utility of Java, and the expected growth of this market. A study by In-Stat Inc., conducted in February 1995, indicated that the embedded processor market is slated to grow from 3.5 billion in 1996 to 4.5 billion by the year 2000.
To take advantage of this growing market, Sun announced it is designing a line of Java microprocessors. At the low end, a sub-5 picoJava chip has been designed for cellular phones, printers, and other consumer electronics. At the beginning of next year, Sun will release the first microJava prototypes, with better graphics and performance than picoJava, and with a price range of 5 to 0. By the end of next year, Sun will start testing UltraJava for advanced 3-D and multimedia applications.
“There is not a pervasive standard or base in the microcontroller world,” said Chet Silvestri, president of Sun Microelectronics. “We think Java will change that. In the microcontroller world, OS portability, power consumption, and size are the dominant factors for the processors incorporated into products. There is more than just computers on the network. Everything is getting wired — printers, copiers, fax machines. PicoJava is a small core that can be licensed for many applications. We want to open the floodgates and work with some partners that can create vast markets.”
At the JavaOne conference, Sun Microelectronics announced it has started licensing the picoJava core to others. Representatives from LG Semiconductor, Mitsubishi, Northern Telecom (Nortel), Rockwell International, Samsung, and Xerox announced plans to incorporate Java into a variety of products for end users and OEMs.
“We agree completely … that there will be a significant amount of silicon cast in Java, and it really could not have come at a better time considering the current state of the DRAM industry,” said John Zucker, senior vice president of Mitsubishi Electronics of America. “We are looking to ship a lot of silicon with Java over the next couple of years. This also gives us the ability to extend Java across our entire product line. The silicon supplier not only has to be aware of process technology and packaging, we also have to be familiar with the system aspects, so it is quite a responsibility. We look at Java as the tool that will allow us to move into that area.”
Even though the chips are not ready yet, some companies plan to dive right into the marketplace. “The market for Java products is not waiting for the chips,” Silvestri said. “The Java chips will just provide a more cost-effective solution.”
Initially Mitsubishi intends to port Java to its existing line of multimedia processors based around the M32R/D. At JavaOne the company was even demonstrating the MonAMI, an experimental, mobile Java terminal based on the chip. But eventually, Mitsubishi plans to incorporate Java into its own silicon directly. The company plans to have samples for evaluation at the end of 1996 and will start generally delivering them in the first quarter of 1997.
“Availability of the Java chips is not on the critical path to product development,” explained Zucker. “It is also not on the critical path to early introduction because we will take a hit on the cost for the early marketplace. However, it is on the critical path of a cost-effective product.”
Xerox Corp. plans to embed Java processors into future generations of multipurpose office equipment. For example, a Java processor would enable a printer to automatically download and print out the latest news from the Internet without any intervention from an end user, and without the need for a separate computer.
This is not the first time that Xerox has dreamed of an integrated network for office appliances. Xerox actually worked with Microsoft to develop a similar technology, which stalled because Microsoft could not make its software work quickly enough with embedded processor applications running on the equipment.
“The big lever that Wintel [Windows/Intel] has is the OS and application software,” said Beau Vrolyk, vice president and general manager of Workgroup Products at Xerox. “That does not apply in embedded applications. You want a good response time and a ubiquitousness of code. While Wintel is certainly a competitor in this business, it has not come close to reaching the performance of Sun and Zilog for embedded applications.”
Rockwell International Corp. has invested considerable effort in developing high-speed, 3-D military simulations, and believes Java will enable it to leverage its existing work for a host of new applications.
“Rockwell has 15 years of experience with a family of custom microprocessors that are extremely similar to the Java machine,” said Steve Maher, manager of processor and software technology for the Advanced Technology and Engineering Group at Rockwell. “With hundreds of thousands of lines of code running on this architecture, I can say that this architecture works for high-performance applications. We have been touting this approach for some time and are excited that Sun is moving Java forward.”
Northern Telecom is working on incorporating Java into its existing line of PowerTouch TV-screen-based telephones this summer, and plans to begin customer trials in 1997. The screen phones are nothing new to Nortel. It first released the phones based on the advanced digital subscriber interface (ADSI) several years ago, as a way for consumers and businesses to send text information over telephone lines. But the phones never reached ubiquity because there was a limited number of services and even fewer ADSI programmers. Despite such limited utility, Nortel claims to have sold about a million of them so far, and expects to sell another 200,000 this year.
Northern Telecom will begin by taking its existing design and adding a few components for doing the Java processing. It will allow the phones to support graphics and surf the Web. Eventually, the company plans to create an upgrade chip that existing screen-phone users will be able to install into their phones so they can support Java. In addition, they will create a line of Java-based cellular telephones.
Ian Sugarbroad, vice president of wireless terminals at the Personal Network Products Division of Northern Telecom, sees two key uses of such devices. Specialty information providers, such as stockbrokers, will use them to provide information to their mobile customers, and telephone companies will use them to distinguish their communications service.
Java gets around
Although a number of companies have plans for Java silicon, for many it makes sense to just port the Java Virtual Machine to their own platform and run with it. For example, HDS Network Systems has created its own operating system around Java called HDS netOS.
“While this operating system incorporates Internet technologies such as Java and an integrated Web browser, it goes beyond the basic NC Reference Profile by also including technology that allows a network computer to run a wide range of existing applications,” said Michael Kantrowitz, executive vice president of HDS. “Our concept is that it should work with everything you already have. You don’t have to change your network or your infrastructure.”
HDS netOS users will be able to run Java, DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, Unix, and terminal emulation applications. Initially netOS will be incorporated into HDS’ new line of network computers called The HDS @workstation. In addition, HDS will sell netOS as an upgrade to existing X-terminal users so that they can upgrade their devices to support the Network Computer Reference Profile proposed by Sun, Oracle, and IBM. HDS also plans to license netOS to other vendors for use on their equipment.
Diving into the chip world, WindRiver Systems plans to port Java to its VxWorks embedded-processor operating system. WindRiver already has ported the Java Virtual Machine to its operating system, but is working out the final license negotiations with JavaSoft before it sells the OS. Developers will be able to use WindRiver’s Tornado embedded systems development environment to create Java applications that run anywhere that VxWorks does. Since WindRiver is one of the largest suppliers of embedded-systems development tools, its Java products will likely make it easier for developers to drive Java into just about every appliance imaginable, without having to learn a new development environment.
Java will even find its way into set-top boxes with the help of Microware Corp. and its OS-9 operating system. OS-9 has been around for more than a decade, and over the last couple of years, Microware has been optimizing a version of it to run on set-top boxes for next-generation cable TV services.
At JavaOne, Microware demonstrated a Web-enabled set-top box. When users clicked on a channel on a Web page, it automatically tuned a TV window to the appropriate channel. The company is working with the Texas Instruments software research lab to integrate Java into the set-top box of the future. In addition to easy TV tuning, Microware is developing Java classes to integrate standard TV signals into Java applets and to orchestrate TV and Internet streams.
JavaOS comes to town
Although Sun is working aggressively with the major operating systems vendors to port Java to every platform, it is also implementing a trimmed-down JavaOS (formerly Kona) that is fast, efficient, and able to run on a variety of platforms. JavaOS is dynamically extensible, so that it brings the advantages of the Java programming language to an OS.
JavaOS can be scaled down for even the tiniest of applications to run in only 512 kilobytes of ROM and 128 kilobytes of RAM, thereby fitting in devices such as toasters and light switches that do not need to display any data. For graphics-oriented applications, however, JavaOS needs 4 megabytes of ROM and 4 megabytes of RAM to run well.
To create an OS that boots up, Java needed a way to run from ROM. However, Java-based bytecodes are modified when they are run, so they cannot be placed into ROM as is. In order to store the OS on a ROM, JavaSoft created the ROMizer tool. This converts a set of class files into ROMable Java-based images that can be booted.
Jim Mitchell, chief technology officer at JavaSoft, said, “JavaOS is elegantly simple and extremely powerful at the same time. It was designed with a single purpose — to be just enough OS of just the right kind to run the Java Virtual Machine, which brings Java to a huge new range of electronic appliances. No other software platform has the reach that JavaOS provides for Java.”
The first versions of JavaOS run on SPARC and Intel x86 architectures, and should be ready to be deployed in commercial devices this October. In future versions of the OS, Sun plans to add a number of key features such as a device driver interface, enhanced windows and graphics components, and an enhanced network protocol suite with PPP features.
Companies that have announced plans to port Java to their microprocessors include ARM Ltd., Cirrus Logic, Fujitsu Microelectronics, LSI Logic, and National Semiconductor.
“Our customers are telling us that the Internet can add significant value to their product lines,” said Gunnar Hurtig, senior vice president of National Semiconductor. “National Semiconductor will be ready with reference designs and architectures to speed our customers to market. Java and JavaOS are important technologies for connecting analog and mixed-signal solutions to the Internet and corporate intranets.”
In addition, a number of other companies have licensed JavaOS to run on a wide variety of machines. These companies include Acer Inc., Acer Peripherals, Alcatel Business Systems, Axil Computers, ETEN Information Systems Co., Hua-Hsing Information Corp., Hyundai Electronics, Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry, Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute, Lite-On Technology, LG Electronics, Mitac Inc., Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Nestor Technology, Nokia, Omron Corporation, Oracle, Proton, Sun Moon Star, SunRiver Data Systems, Tatung Co. Thompson-Sun Interactive Alliance, Toshiba Corp., UMAX, Visionetics International Technology, and Xerox.
In the near term, JavaOS may make an attractive alternative to running Windows on your Intel desktop or Solaris or SunOS on your SPARCstation. In a test using Pendragon’s Caffeine Java benchmark program, Sun found that HotJava performed almost twice as fast on JavaOS as it did on Solaris, even before the company had finished optimizing JavaOS for speed. Perhaps this will encourage a number of PC owners to load JavaOS as an operating system, at least for surfing the Net. If you installed Corel WordPerfect for Java, you would not even need to go to Windows to work.
One of the key limitations of the current implementation of JavaOS is that it can communicate at a maximum of about 500 kilobytes per second. This is probably adequate for many uses, particularly for people using it over a modem. Data-intensive communications, such as multimedia conferencing, however, will be limited when run over a LAN or a high-speed WAN. This will prove a real limitation when cable companies try to support high-quality video over the high-speed data networks they are rolling out to homes right now.
To address this limitation, Zydecom Inc. is developing a real-time Java-compatible operating system called I-97 RTOS. This will allow communications applications written in Java to take full advantage of high-speed networks for delivering information. The first version of I-97 is expected to be commercially available at the beginning of 1997.
Zydecom is a recent spin-off of ICON Industrial Controls, which made real-time operating systems for the industrial environment. Zydecom took the core system it had been developing at ICON and tuned it for high-speed multimedia applications that can handle multimedia data streams at rates in excess of 8 megabits per second.
The one thing that I-97 is not designed to do is a lot of number crunching. “You will not do a lot of local processing. The only real processing you will do is the decompression of data,” said Don Adrian, president of Zydecom.
Adrian envisions that I-97 will be used on PCs as an alternative to Windows when you want to video conference or watch TV. When you are done talking, you can reboot your machine into Windows to do some work. It will also be installed on set-top boxes and other standalone devices that will be used for multimedia communications in the home and office.
Conclusion
The Java-based network computers already have started shipping from companies like HDS. This fall, the first consumer electronics devices based on Java will start to appear in limited quantity as companies experiment with new products by porting the Java runtime to their own silicon. At the beginning of next year, the first low-cost Java appliances based on Java silicon will appear.
As companies ramp up production, the Java chips will fall in price, making it attractive to embed them in a variety of applications where communication and low cost are important. If Java maintains the kind of enthusiasm shown by the first licensees, it is only a matter of time before you will be able to check your kitchen Web page to see if your toast is done, or your java is finished brewing.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly indicated the JavaOS communicates at 500 kilobits per second. In fact, it communicates at 500 kilobytes per second. JavaWorld regrets the error, which has been corrected in this current version of the article.
