Plans for the operating system, which is officially called Windows NT Embedded 4.0, were first tipped in May in a Networld+Interop keynote speech by Microsoft senior vice president Jim Allchin.

At this week's Embedded Systems Conference, Microsoft said the NT Embedded 4.0 code is currently undergoing Alpha testing. "Some 35 OEM partners of ours have it now," said John Frederiksen, an NT product manager at Microsoft. "It will go into broad-scale beta testing in early 1999 and then will ship as soon as possible thereafter."

Frederiksen emphasized that the NT release was aimed at the high end of the embedded market, where a small memory footprint and real-time response times are typically not required.

"The five main market segments we're aiming at are telecommunications, office automation, industrial automation, medical devices and point-of-sale terminals, he said. Frederiksen cited routers as one area where Microsoft would vigorously vie for design wins for the technology.

NT Embedded 4.0 will ship with a configuration tool, which will enables developers to manage the size of their respective implementations. While a bare-bones build of the OS would take about 12 Mbytes, Frederiksen said that typical applications would probably require memory footprints of around 20 to 25 Mbytes.

Developers requiring real-time support for their NT deployments can get that via a number of third-party add-on products, such as RTX from VenturCom Inc. or Intime from Radisys Corp.