With customers including Draeger Medical, Siemens Acuson (NYSE: SI), GE Healthcare (NYSE: GE), and Cardiac Sciences, General Software, Inc. (www.gensw.com) is seeing increased need for its specialized and highly customizable Embedded BIOS® with StrongFrame® Technology by medical device manufacturers.

While medical devices often require the processing power of a desktop PC, their behavior and performance specifications for market success are significantly different.

Instead of being constrained by an inflexible OEM or desktop BIOS, device manufacturers are turning to General Software's firmware, Embedded BIOS® with StrongFrame® Technology. Its ability to differentiate medical products through selecting proprietary behaviors instead of IT desktop behaviors, is unprecedented. With more than 1,000 configuration options at the source level, it is easy to selectively enable BIOS features and behaviors that apply to the design and remove those that do not.

One of the highest costs of product development for medical device manufacturers is the software development process. Stringent certification standards in the industry necessitate detailed and coordinated phases for requirements, specifications, design, development, and test.

With its sixth generation firmware, toolkit and training, General Software facilitates control of this process and, as one example, enabled its customer, Siemens Acuson, to shorten time-to-market for a board used in Ultrasound devices. Similarly, General Software worked closely with GE Healthcare to meet extremely tight specification demands required for its medical device LCDs.

General Software's ability to selectively enable code paths within the BIOS is also very important for certification. It removes unused code paths during the build, reducing the code coverage burden and eliminating automatic functionality in POST that might otherwise run unnecessarily on systems that do not use the functionality. This not only has a positive performance impact but it also eliminates code paths that cannot be tested and, therefore, certified.

The quick boot feature of Embedded BIOS® with StrongFrame® Technology is another major advantage for medical devices. The high performance POST can be configured to boot in under one second, depending on the hardware components to be initialized. For monitoring equipment, the "time to waveform" (TTW) is a tremendously important function, especially when critical patient care is concerned. TTW can achieve analog response times when the high performance POST is optimized for the manufacturer's design.

Embedded BIOS® with StrongFrame® Technology also features:

--  High Availability (HA) subsystem that monitors entire system health
    and "self heals" itself by implementing configurable recovery policies
--  Remote provisioning and monitoring
--  The fastest boot in the industry (0.085 second POST, 0.838 second
    Linux boot, and 24 second Windows Vista boot)
--  Robust diagnostics, and advanced security options
    

About General Software, Inc.

General Software provides firmware for a wide range of applications including Ultra-Mobile PCs, industrial PCs, targeted PCs, differentiated mainboards, telecom/datacom equipment, servers, blades, and embedded devices including medical, gaming, kiosks, point-of-sale, DVR, and commercial and military avionics. Original Device Manufacturers (ODMs) choose the General Software® brand for the domain expertise that gets customers to market quickly, reduces project risks and enables market differentiation for highly successful products. For more information about General Software visit www.gensw.com, e-mail sales@gensw.com, or call us at 800.850.5755 or 425.576.8300.

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