Porting Partner Program Drives Windows CE Adoption

In an effort to broaden hardware support for Windows CE, Microsoft has announced the Windows CE Porting Partner Program. The program gives semiconductor vendors (SVs) more flexibility when porting CE to their chips and will create more channels for semiconductor vendors to get the actual porting work done. In recent years, a single company, BSQUARE, has done all porting of the operating system (OS) to new chips.

Scott Horn, group program manager for Microsoft’s Windows CE Tools Group, says that because embedded systems designers demand a wide selection of CPUs, Microsoft wants CE “supported on as many processors as possible.” The new program, says Horn, “gives SVs a lot of flexibility and allows them to get in at lower cost, or to get new features faster, than ever before.”

More Flexibility

Typically, the porting process involves rewriting parts of the kernel to support a new chip and recompiling the OS for the new processor. Development tools such as Windows CE Platform Builder are also modified. Systems integrators or hardware manufacturers then create a custom build of CE, using Platform Builder, to support a custom device, such as a bar code scanner.