Consumer Devices Practice

Consumer Services Practice

In the consumer electronics industry, time-to-market is the typical test of a company's agility – but time-to-revenue determines a company's longevity. Short product life cycles drive the need for even shorter product development cycles, so consumer electronics manufacturers must focus on the stages of the development cycle that add the most value to their products. Given this brief, critical window, you can't afford to pick the wrong vendor.

As part of our comprehensive consumer solution, the Wind River Consumer Services Practice consists of a team of engineers with extensive industry experience delivering design, integration, and optimization services tailored to the needs of consumer devices clients. Combined with Wind River Education Services and support network, the Consumer Services Practice improves time-to-revenue by delivering reliable, high-quality solutions quickly and cost-effectively.

Benefits:

High-quality, on time, on budget. Our services team has proven expertise in completing device software projects for the consumer industry. We know how to manage complex development and integration tasks, ensuring excellent quality and timely delivery.
Focus on adding value. By co-sourcing your integration and development work with Wind River Consumer Services, you can concentrate on projects that will deliver higher value and sustainable competitive advantage for your company.
Insider ecosystem knowledge. Our consultants excel at configuring Wind River Platform for Consumer Devices to perform optimally with our hardware and software partner's products. We leverage this in-depth knowledge to deliver the best solution for your business, cutting development costs and speeding time-to-revenue.

Specialized Expertise
Wind River's global team of more than 140 device engineers understands the networking and integration requirements that consumer device manufacturers must meet, and we've built our platforms to address those needs. If you or your customers have unique requirements, Wind River can also create a customized solution. Our extensive industry experience includes power management and media management, as well as other market-specific services designed to keep your development project on track.

IP Portfolio
While becoming industry experts, we've assembled a portfolio of intellectual property (IP) that supports our services practice. Using this portfolio of customizations, accelerators, and enhancements can reduce the cost of your solution and decrease your time to completion. Wind River Professional Services will seamlessly integrate our IP into your solution and tailor it according to your needs.

Methodology
Wind River works within a precisely structured methodology that ensures your project will be completed within the estimated time and at or below the estimated cost, with the top-notch quality you expect. Project execution involves a set of management and development processes based on industry standards, as documented in the Project Management Institute's Guide to Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). The PMBOK was compiled from the best practices of project managers across many markets and disciplines, and Wind River has applied these best practices to our industry-leading project management approach.

Consumer Services
Refined through years of successful project completion, our professional services deliver value, quality, and results. The following offerings from the Wind River Consumer Services Practice have been carefully defined for the needs of consumer device developers:

Requirements Discovery and Definition
Which features are essential? Which hardware platforms are the most suitable? What are the best-of-breed software technologies? We explore challenges, identify options, create development and integration schedules, and determine test and acceptance criteria.

Device Design
Our expert consultants can help develop system requirements, design high-level hardware and software architecture, and assess your current technology. It is also possible to co-source your system design either partially or entirely to Wind River Design Services to help guarantee success.

System Design
Wind River translates the basic decisions of discovery and definition into detailed hardware and software implementations, rigorously worked through at every level of detail. We implement a review process that helps ensure all issues are addressed before they become critical problems. This process may include system requirement development, hardware and software high-level architecture design, technology assessments, and project risk analysis.

Hardware Design and Prototyping
We can design hardware and FPGAs and lay out the printed circuit board to meet initial certification and manufacturing requirements. Working with silicon vendor partners from our comprehensive ecosystem, we can ensure that you are optimizing chip performance. Controlling costs and schedule, we can integrate hardware and software to create a fully functional prototype of your product.

Custom Board Support Packages
Our experienced engineering consultants will analyze the hardware and develop an integrated Wind River–compliant BSP. Wind River BSP professionals have access to resources, device drivers, and consulting and engineering experts.

BSP and Driver Optimization
Our BSP and driver experts can analyze your consumer device hardware, then create the software package you need to optimize both your development process and the behavior of your deployed device.

Hardware Abstraction
We can help you port existing applications across multiple CPUs more easily, as well as evaluate existing application code, language, and constructs to determine a suitable architecture port. We can also evaluate hardware dependencies, drivers, and communication stacks. Actual development work varies widely, depending on application complexity, certification requirements, and hardware choices.

Media Management
The ability to store, organize, and retrieve a vast amount of content from storage is critical in consumer electronics devices, especially digital video recorder (DVR/PVR) devices. Wind River works with clients to determine usage, failure, and security scenarios. Based on those findings, we can help implement appropriate third-party or custom solutions to ensure successful content management.

Power Management
Many consumer devices use batteries, must adhere to "green" energy requirements, or need to recover seamlessly from a power failure – so their ability to manage power effectively can be critical. Wind River analyzes and determines which functions and components are essential, then employs techniques to meet these demands and give the user a positive experience.

Performance and Size Optimization
Responsiveness to a user stimulus can affect consumer acceptance, and code size can have an impact on the BOM cost. Wind River can assist in these areas by evaluating the low-level code, the interaction with the hardware, and potentially the application code, to determine where functionality can be streamlined or off-loaded to meet performance and code size requirements.

Software System and Middleware Integration
Using our consumer device software best practices, we can extend Wind River Platform for Consumer Devices to include customized functionality, tools, and third-party middleware technology.

Legacy Application and Infrastructure Migration
To ensure the success of your current applications, we can assist in porting to and validating legacy software systems with your new Wind River platform.

Linux Development Foundation
We can collaborate with you to establish a Linux strategy that includes an integrated and tested kernel, file system, Linux BSP, and development environment.

Device Management Implementation Using Web Services
This includes network topology, control mechanisms, upgrade scenarios and plans, data management, and rules-based routing or processing of collected data.

GUI Implementation
We can help design and implement your device menu structure and graphical user interface (GUI), including interfacing with marketing/brand teams to determine and develop GUI specifications, optimizing the design based on tool preferences, and integrating the GUI into an application and lower-level functionality.

Integration of Wireless Networking Support
We can identify environmental factors that impact data movement, data integrity, and the ability of a given technology to meet project or application requirements. This could include integration of 802.11 (a, b, g) Wi-Fi, ultra-wideband, 802.16 (WiMAX), Bluetooth, or other stacks. We can help evaluate wireless silicon solutions based on existing target architecture, protocol support required, and complexity of drivers.

Network Security
As devices continue to become connected, network security for wireless and wired networks is growing in importance. Wind River has product offerings for 802.1x, IPsec, and EAP. If your client has network security requirements beyond those provided by our Platform for Consumer Devices, the Wind River Consumer Services Practice can assist with integrating, extending, and optimizing our products to meet your clients' needs.

Production Qualification
As part of a larger effort, we work with clients to evaluate, qualify, and interface with manufacturers to translate a prototype into a fully optimized design ready for high-volume manufacturing. Throughout this process, we support user tests and evaluations and execute formal approval testing, including agency certifications for EMI and safety.

Real-Time Best Practices
Our seasoned consultants can leverage their consumer device expertise to extend your engineering team's capabilities, creating a long-term relationship that extends beyond a single project. Wind River's services staff can even manage the development and maintenance of all lower system software layers, so your team can focus on the application software that adds the highest value.

Contact Us
Wind River Professional Services enables our customers to get the most out of Wind River products and solutions, so many clients prefer to collaborate with us throughout the entire development life cycle. The Wind River Consumer Services Practice employs world-class staff, processes, and technology to deliver value, quality, and results. For more information or to have a sales representative contact you, please contact us at 1-800-545-WIND (9463) or inquiries@windriver.com.