Entering its 12th year, RTAS is organized by the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems. That group also sponsors the Real-Time Systems Symposium, typically held in December. While that conference focuses on foundation technology, RTAS was formed to focus more on applications, said Douglas Stuart, RTAS 2006 cochair and software engineer at Boeing.

Stuart said that RTAS is traditionally held in the spring, and was colocated with ESC Silicon Valley beginning last year in order to provide "outreach" to the practitioner community. This year, he said, involves a more formal relationship that includes the joint sponsorship of a panel.

Stuart said RTAS typically attracts as many as 200 attendees, and is an international conference that draws from both academia and industry. "It addresses the research community and some of the industrial practitioner community, but there's more of a research focus than there is at the Embedded Systems Conference," he said.

This year, Stuart said, RTAS has four areas of emphasis: real-time and embedded systems theory, industrial applications, development tools and hardware/software co-design. RTAS and ESC Silicon Valley are also jointly sponsoring a Thursday afternoon panel that probes the relationship between academia and industry. It will be chaired by Steve Liu, associate professor of computer science at Texas A&M University.

RTAS 2006 opens Tuesday, April 4 with tutorials and workshops. The technical program begins Wednesday, April 5, with a keynote by Douglas Schmidt of Vanderbilt University on the challenges of ultralarge-scale real-time systems.

Subsequent sessions during the next three days include real-time operating systems, resource management, scheduling, distributed and multiprocessor scheduling, design and development, sensor networks, worst-case execution analysis, real-time communication, modeling, multimedia and energy awareness. The conference includes 38 papers.