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| Now available with ThreadX RTOS support, the EFM32 delivers up to a 300% reduction in power consumption, compared with other Cortex-M3-based solutions. |
Royalty-free RTOS now available for energy-efficient microcontrollers
San Diego, CA, October 25, 2010 ― Express Logic, Inc., the worldwide leader in royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS), today announced ThreadX® RTOS support of Energy Micro’s Cortex™-M3-based EFM®32 microcontroller (MCU) family. Designed for small footprint, demanding real-time control, the ThreadX RTOS is a perfect match for the EFM32 Gecko, which targets energy-sensitive real-time control applications including energy, water, and gas metering, building automation, alarm and security, and portable medical/fitness equipment.
Energy Micro develops, markets and sells ultra-low power microcontrollers using the industry leading 32-bit ARM® Cortex-M3 architecture. ThreadX’s limited memory usage and short entry-return from power-saving sleep ideally suits the combination of EFM32 microcontroller’s energy friendly autonomous low-power features and the Cortex-M3 CPU. This combination is critical for bringing new safe and energy-friendly medical equipment and industrial systems to life.
“The ThreadX RTOS offers the high-speed and small memory footprint crucial to the energy-sensitive markets the EFM32 Gecko microcontrollers target,” commented Oyvind Janbu, Energy Micro’s CTO. “Designing reliable and long-lasting battery-operated applications requires a framework that reduces overhead and response time. ThreadX and EFM32 devices provide an unmatched solution.”
The EFM32 Gecko microcontroller family consumes a fraction of the energy required by other 8-, 16- and 32-bit microcontroller solutions. The EFM32 Gecko MCU is in full production, and Energy Micro has revelead details of the software and pin-compatible Tiny Gecko and Giant Gecko products. A comprehensive tool suite supports the Gecko MCU, and the unique energyAware Profiler enables designers to perform real-time energy debugging directly on their system.
Express Logic’s ThreadX® RTOS offers a robust library of application-callable operating system services that simplify and optimize the performance of an embedded system. ThreadX is designed for microcontroller-based applications and features a small memory footprint of under 6KB so it can reside in even the most limited on-chip MCU memory. ThreadX provides preemptive, real-time, priority-based scheduling for optimum responsiveness and high performance and includes services such as thread scheduling, message passing, resource allocation, synchronization, and interrupt management.
ThreadX is complemented by FileX®, a full embedded file system, NetX™, a rich but small-footprint IPv4/IPv6 TCP/IP stack, USBX™, a full USB Host/Device/OTG stack, and PrismX™, a graphics development toolkit. TraceX®, Express Logic’s graphical real-time event analysis development tool, also is available for the EFM32 Gecko. ThreadX is provided with full source code and is fully integrated into the IAR Embedded Workbench IDE.
A free evaluation version of ThreadX and a demonstration program in source code form are available for the EFM32 Gecko from Express Logic’s web site, www.rtos.com. The demonstration program consists of a simple multithreaded application that uses many advanced, yet easy-to-use features of ThreadX, including message passing, thread creation, and scheduling. The entire application, including the ThreadX RTOS, requires less than 7KB of flash and less than 4KB of SRAM. Users can modify the demonstration or write a completely new ThreadX application up to the evaluation version’s limits, which consist of ten threads, one instantiation of each type of memory pool, and a maximum of two instantiations for each of the other ThreadX objects. The demo application is provided in C source code form, and is fully integrated with the EFM32 system and intended for use with the IAR tools.
“We are pleased to provide ThreadX RTOS support for Energy Micro’s EFM32 Gecko microcontrollers,” commented William E. Lamie, CEO of Express Logic. “These power-saving MCUs enable ThreadX to deliver sub-microsecond context-switch performance for the most demanding real-time applications.”
Shipping and Availability
ThreadX is available in full source code form, royalty free, and at license prices starting at $12,500.
About Energy Micro, AS
Energy Micro develops, markets and sells the world’s most energy friendly microcontrollers, based on the industry leading ARM® Cortex™-M3 32-bit architecture. The company was founded in 2007 by experienced semiconductor professionals with previous expertise from Chipcon, Texas Instruments, Atmel, Nordic Semiconductor. Energy Micro is backed by leading Nordic investors Northzone Ventures and Investinor. More information on Energy Micro is available at www.energymicro.com
About Express Logic and ThreadX
Headquartered in San Diego, CA, Express Logic offers the most advanced run-time solution for deeply embedded applications, including the popular ThreadX® RTOS, the high-performance NetX™ TCP/IP stack, the FileX™ embedded MS-DOS compatible file system, and the USBX™ Host/Device USB protocol stack. All products from Express Logic include full source-code and have no run-time royalties. For more information about Express Logic solutions, please visit the Web site at www.expresslogic.com, call 1-888-THREADX, or email inquires to [email protected].
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ThreadX, BenchX, TraceX, and FileX are registered trademarks, and NetX, CANX, USBX, StackX, preemption-threshold, picokernel, and UDP fast path technology, are trademarks of Express Logic, Inc. All other brands or product names are the property of their respective holders.
Graphic can be downloaded from the Express Logic press room on the Hughes Communications’ website.
Caption: Now available with ThreadX RTOS support, the EFM32 delivers up to a 300% reduction in power consumption, compared with other Cortex-M3-based solutions.