Greetings! This is a mid year update on events. In brief, TYX continues to build on the innovations as reported in the beginning of the year. We report progress segment by segment.

TYX delivered the PAWS Developer’s Studio and RTS for the RTCASS program in March ’99. There are currently parallel efforts underway to complete the instrument drivers for this platform at INDRA DTD in Spain and at the US Navy as well as at Lockheed Martin. TYX are awaiting a go-ahead to add the Video Pattern Generator constructs to the RTCASS delivery.

TYX are currently implementing the PAWS solution on the IFTE (CTE) platform. This is slated for delivery in August ’99.

TYX is concluding our integration efforts on the Instrument Drivers and we expect to complete our activities this month. Over the past several months, we have been developing pure IEEE 716 1989 ATLAS Instrument Drivers for the complete set of TETS instruments including the Teradyne M910 DTU. For the M910, TYX has developed a comprehensive ATLAS interface to the Teradyne supplied Plug n’ Play driver. News Flash…. TYX just got acceptance on the integration efforts at Mantech.

TYX has just been awarded a contract to provide another PAWS environment for the Vertical Test Stations located in the Gyro Test Facility at Warner Robins AFB. This now brings a modernized PAWS solution to the three most common forms of Gyro test platforms; RATE, DIRECTIONAL and VERTICAL.

We are nearing completion of an Air Force funded program to drive the ADINTS test station with the PAWS software on the tester. For this project, TYX is working with our subsidiary ARC in San Antonio. TYX has enhanced the PAWS MATE compiler for the ADINTS peculiar constructs and ARC has replaced the aging computer with a Pentium PC and is migrating legacy test programs.

TYX concluded our Y2K migration activities on the MK 48 torpedo tester at NUWC navy base in Rhode Island. The purpose of this effort was to migrate the ATLAS test programs from a non-Y2K compliant platform to Windows NT. TYX performed stellar on this contract and we completed our migration of over 500,000 lines of code in three months.

On this important upgrade program, TYX are supplying the PAWS software suite and assisting in the integration of the Hardware to the PAWS system ; i.e. development of Instrument drivers.

That pretty much covers the action on the majority of the family of DoD Testers in the good ol’ USA.

We refer the reader to the section on R&D efforts to learn about other exciting developments.

On the European front, the EFA GPATE award has been made to INDRA DTD Spain, who are negotiating their contract as of press time. There are a number of re-host efforts underway in Europe:

• Replacement of obsolete ATEs; this program covers Tank testers, and involves a lot of legacy TPS some of which are written in HP BASIC! Our German Distributor, SEKAS GmbH is heavily involved in this program.
• Tornado mid-life update; this program is alive and kicking and we are slated to provide a number of PAWS systems for this update.
• Embedded Systems; TYX are providing a Windows NT Embedded based PAWS system in support of this tank application.
• Elettronica have purchased a PAWS NT configuration to migrate their earlier EURODASS TPS. We are awaiting similar actions from the other EURODASS partners.
• Agusta have purchased a PAWS configuration in support of their work on the SHAPAW program for the EH-101.

All in all, a busy first half year on the European front!

On the Far Eastern front, we hosted three (count them 3!) PAWS User Group meetings back to back this year in the first week of June. The venues were Osaka, Nagoya, and Tokyo. Overall, there were some 60+ attendees. The number and attendance is a testimonial to the interest in PAWS in Japan. We are currently on the tail end of the F-2 program, and there are a number of other initiatives under way, and we will report them in due course, as we are sworn to secrecy on a number of these Programs. The NEC TOW Missile re-host is almost complete (some 90% complete), and the interesting highlight is that about 50% of the TPS show a reduction in run time of 50%! This project replaced an obsolete proprietary tester with a HP COTS tester including new ITAs’.

The Next Generation of tools has taken flight in the form of the Adaptive, Re-configurable Test System Software (ARTS). TYX is part of an innovative team lead by Aeroflex/Lintek who have delivered an advanced virtual RF test system for Hughes Space and Communications (HSC) in El Segundo, CA.

Projections call for a reduction in test time from 42 shifts for integration test to 6 or less shifts with this innovative solution. An overview of ARTS is available on our web site, http://www.tyx.com.

We are delighted that a number of our customers have recently upgraded their older systems on the account of the Year 2000 (Y2K) bug being prevalent in either their Operating Systems or, occasionally, on their platforms. PAWS itself has been certified as being Y2K compliant with the Release 3.14.1 and above. Recently we uncovered a PAWS related Y2K issue for older systems. These older versions do not handle the leap year correctly after 1/1/00. The details are posted on our web site. This should prompt some of you with older releases to take a second look as the new millenium is fast approaching. As I write this newsletter my Y2K clock shows 175 Days remaining!

In addition to the completion of the NUWC Y2K related upgrade, European customers have upgraded systems for Nuclear Power Plants. TYX and our subsidiary Access Research Corporation, stand ready to provide you with turnkey solutions to this problem, including Validation and Verification of all your Test Programs (TPS’).

TYX was awarded an SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) Program from the USAF on the topic JAVA Based Automatic Test System and Test Program Set Environment. This Phase I award was announced in early May and we are planning to develop a rudimentary prototype within the nine-month contract duration.

The technical objectives for the Java ATS project are to develop a comprehensive Java based ATS software architecture, develop a prototype ATS and simple TPS to demonstrate cross platform compatibility and to fully document the results. The benefits of commercial ATS with such open, robust architecture is that is will greatly diminish the effects of obsolescence due to proprietary aspects of a given design. It will allow for the common development and integration of other software tools and utilities that will greatly assist in TPS re-host, development, documentation, and program development to the DoD and commercial arenas. This effort is taking advantage of an emerging software technology and concept, embedded in Java and merging it with the technical testing know how of the ATS discipline.

If our SBIR results are accepted by the USAF, there is a potential for follow-on Phase II and III efforts to help commercialize our concepts. As results emerge from this innovative program, we will keep you posted.

As a result of the RTCASS development, the PAWS system sports the ability to interface with different Graphics formats directly from the ATLAS world. Various multi media formats such as MPEG, JPG, GIF, BMP, HTML etc. can be accessed from ATLAS. Please refer to our web site if you would like more information about these features.

As a result of the IFTE CTE development, the PAWS system has the ability to mirror the IFTE Station displays. This is further evidence of the component ware and middle ware which the PAWS product line is rapidly evolving into. As a result of the adoption of such open architecture, it is quite straightforward to plug in additional requirements using Java, C++, or Visual Basic.

In this development effort, TYX is separating the Run Time System GUI and engine components. The reasoning behind this is twofold; to provide a distributed architecture and to allow our customers to "bolt-on" custom man machine interfaces. Our design presents a DCOM interface to the external world thus allowing other software components to plug into our RTS. Some of the goals of this design were to specify a set of services that:

• Facilitate the encapsulation of the RTS to be an open server component capable of runtime collaboration with other control, monitoring and input / output components
• Permit multiple clients to monitor RTS performance and obtain state information.
• Provide fully configurable notification mechanisms for a variety of events
• Minimize the real-time impact of GUI and notification overhead
• Support for RTS / GUI distribution on different machines
• Employ method parameter types compatible with Visual Basic, Java and C++ bindings.

Our first planned delivery of this technology is scheduled for the Boeing PIP later this year. In this scenario, the RTS server engine will reside on the PIP and the client will be controlled by an IETM located on the Sikorsky Portable Maintenance Aid.

On a parallel effort to this activity, we are furiously working on our code name Unison project. In this exciting project, we are developing a Java based GUI as a plug-in software component to the RTS engine. We have just prototyped a Kanji character GUI which proved the openness of the RTS architecture.

The PAWS RTS has been enhanced to enable improved handling of ATLAS connection variables. The algorithm for determining switch paths involving connection variables was modified to achieve the following main goals: