Support for Stellaris microcontrollers

Micrium, a leading provider of high quality embedded software components, has announced that its uC/OS-II RTOS now fully supports Luminary Micro's Stellaris microcontrollers based on the ARM CortexT-M3 microcontroller core. A port of uC/OS-II and a demonstration application are now included in Stellaris Development Kits. The combined technologies will allow companies using 8-bit or 16-bit CPUs to get 32-bit performance for the same cost, while also bringing faster designs to market.

The code provided by Micrium for the demo is a small multithreaded application which uses select features of uC/OS-II and the LCD display on the Stellaris development board to show real-time statistics on the program, such as processor speed and utilisation, number of context switches and clock ticks.

Stellaris kits include the full functionality and source code of uC/OS-II, and require a license for use in commercial applications.

'uC/OS-II was one of the first RTOSes ported to the Cortex-M3 core, as ARM used it during the development of the Cortex-M3 processor,' said Jean Anne Booth, Chief Marketing Officer of Luminary Micro.

'We are very pleased to include uC/OS-II in our development kit'.

'With uC/OS-II's small memory footprint and a full suite of embedded software components including a file system, we expect embedded developers to embrace the accessibility of having a Stellaris port of uC/OS-II in the development kit'.

uC/OS-II manages up to 255 tasks, and provides a full array of real time operating services, such as semaphores, event flags, mutual exclusion semaphores, message mailboxes, message queues, task management, fixed size memory block management, time management, and timer management.

'Supporting Luminary Micro and the industry's first silicon implementation of Cortex-M3 in its Stellaris microcontrollers is a logical extension of our ARM-related applications,' said Jean Labrosse, president of Micrium.

'The ARM Cortex-M3 CPU core is well architected to consistently deliver high performance and deterministic results for embedded applications'.

'By porting to the Stellaris line, customers are now able to migrate current applications built around uC/OS-II to the Cortex-M3 architecture'.

The Stellaris line of MCUs brings high-performance 32-bit computing to cost-sensitive embedded microcontroller applications at a cost equivalent to legacy 8- and 16-bit devices.

Cortex-M3 are the first chips to implement exclusively ARM's Thumb-2 instructions, offering a reduction in gate count, die size and power consumption in a 32-bit CPU.

Stellaris MCUs are targeted at embedded and industrial applications, such as building and home automation; factory automation; motor control; and industrial power control devices.

uC/OS-II, The Real-Time Kernel is a highly portable, ROMable, very scalable, preemptive real-time, multitasking kernel real time operating system (RTOS) for microprocessors and microcontrollers.

uC/OS-II is provided with all source code, which is 100% portable ANSI C.

The internals of uC/OS-II are described in the book 'MicroC/OS-II, The Real-Time Kernel' (ISBN 1-57820-103-9) by Jean J.

Labrosse.

Easily scaled because of the modular nature of the source code, uC/OS-II can present a very small footprint for space-constrained embedded designs.

uC/OS-II has been widely embraced and can be delivered as a pre-certifiable software component for safety-critical systems, including avionics RTCA DO-178B and EUROCAE ED-12B, medical FDA 510(k), transportation and nuclear systems standard IEC 61058, DO-178B Level A Class III medical devices, and SIL3/SIL4 ICE-certified systems.