Fastest-in-its-class RTOS eliminates the complexity of using interrupts

Date: 14/3/2009

Fastest-in-its-class RTOS eliminates the complexity of using interrupts

AVIX-RT is an RTOS, specifically developed to complement the popular Microchip PIC24, dsPIC® and PIC32 families, that never disables interrupts but maintains full integration between the interrupt code and the main part of the application.

Engineers using Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) to design with the latest 16- and 32-bit microcontrollers such as the Microchip’s PIC24, dsPIC® and PIC32 families are often faced with unforeseen and complex challenges. For instance, the chosen RTOS will frequently disable interrupts leading to missed interrupts and variable interrupt timing (jitter). Recognising the frustrations that today’s engineer’s face with their embedded systems development AVIX-RT has developed an RTOS specifically to complement these popular Microchip devices. The new AVIX “Zero Latency RTOS” features interrupt latency that equals the latency specified by the hardware, resulting in fully deterministic system behavior never disables interrupts, while still offering full integration between interrupt code and the main part of the application.

AVIX RTOS increases the RAM available to the Microchip-based application by offering a unique system stack for exclusive use by interrupt handlers. In contrast to many competing implementations, AVIX activates the system stack before the thread stack is used, resulting in interrupts handlers that use zero bytes of the stack for each individual thread (AVIX-32). In addition, AVIX ensures that RAM usage is both minimized and fully deterministic whatever the frequency and nesting of interrupts. (See fig 1)

Key among the many other features offered by the new AVIX RTOS is ‘Real Time Thread Activation Tracing’, which provides an unprecedented insight in the dynamic behavior of any AVIX based application. (See fig 2) A largely ‘Type Safe’ programming interface helps in detecting programming errors compile time instead of runtime.

Finally AVIX (Forthcoming version 2.5) scores best in five of the seven tests that comprise the open source ThreadMetric performance test, establishing the new software as the fastest RTOS in its class.
http://www.avix-rt.com/Product/Details/Performance/performance.html

AVIX is available for download at www.ismosys.com and is supplied with a royalty free, unlimited use license that also includes one year of free upgrades and technical support.

For more details about AVIX-RT, click on the link below, or to purchase online click here.