November, 2010
News

Express Logic earns 100 Million Club Membership
Express Logic has been inducted into VisionMobile’s “100 Million Club,” in recognition of the deployment of its ThreadX RTOS in over 500 million mobile handsets--more than five times the minimum entry level--as of the first half of 2010. For more information, see the article elsewhere in this newsletter.
 


iPhone switches from Nucleus to ThreadX
Based on information gathered by DevTeam, and posted on their site, the new Apple iPhone4 baseband radio now uses ThreadX in the Infineon PMB9800, or X-Gold 618, which provides baseband radio operations. Previous iPhones used Nucleus for this function. For the DevTeam comments, please click here.
   "The DevTeam and others have been checking through the iPhone 4, and have noticed the baseband runs a completely different OS than on previous models. The iPhone 3G and 3G[S] both ran Nucleus OS on the PMB8878 baseband CPU (aka XGold 608), where the iPhone 2G ran the PMB8876 (aka S-Gold 2). iPhone 4 uses the PMB9800, or X-Gold 618 – running a separate OS – ThreadX, an RTOS by Express Logic.”
 


Express Logic Introduces PrismX™ for Graphics Development in Consumer, Industrial and Medical Devices 
PrismX offers Windows-based simulation and automated embedded deployment--for more information, click here. ----s

ThreadX® RTOS Deployments Soar to Over 750 Million Led by Wireless SoC Applications
Express Logic, Inc., the worldwide leader in royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS), today announced that the number of ThreadX-based product deployments now totals more than 750 million units [more]

Express Logic Announces Safety-Critical Certification Pack™ for ThreadX® RTOS for RTCA DO-178B and FDA 510(k)
Turnkey solution saves time and expense in meeting safety-critical
regulatory requirements for medical, aerospace and industrial software [more]
Express Logic Simplifies Multicore  Application Development with New TraceX/MC™
Express Logic, Inc. today announced the introduction of TraceX/MC™, a multicore-enabled and expanded version of its powerful TraceX graphical real-time event analysis tool. [more]
Express Logic’s NetX Duo™ IPv6 TCP/IP Stack Passes IPv6 Ready Logo Testing
NetX Duo joins exclusive group of approved embedded solutions for IPv6 [more]

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The latest Express Logic product versions are listed on our website. Visit our Support Page for more details.

 

 

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How Much Memory for the Stack?

One of the toughest (and unfortunately most common) problems in embedded systems is stack overflow and the collateral corruption that it can cause. As a result, we have spent considerable effort inventing creative ways our customers can deal with this problem. ThreadX developers have an array of tools at their disposal to detect and even avoid stack overflow problems. These tools and techniques not only help developers avoid stack overflow due to inadequate stack memory allocation, they also help minimize RAM wasted by allocating excessive memory for thread stacks "just to be safe." The following tools and techniques are discussed at length in a White Paper that is referenced below:
  • Information to enable manual inspection of stack usage 
  • Use of kernel-awareness in debuggers to determine stack usage
  • ThreadX run-time stack checking
  • StackX stack depth analysis
Please click here to view the "Helping you to avoid stack overflow crashes!" white paper for an in-depth discussion of these tools and techniques.
   
Build, Buy, or Open Source?  

As MCUs become more capable, particularly with the appearance of multicore devices, less functionality needs to be implemented in discrete hardware. The flip side of this is that more capable hardware often brings an increase in software complexity. Because of this, today's projects can see software representing 70% of the development effort; not long ago, that would have been 70% hardware. John Carbone (VP of Marketing at Express Logic) discusses this issue in New Electronics. Click here to read this article.

Express Logic Inducted into 100 Million Club 

  Express Logic has been inducted into VisionMobile’s “100 Million Club,” in recognition of the deployment of its ThreadX RTOS in over 500 million mobile handsets--more than five times the minimum entry level--as of the first half of 2010.
 
 VisionMobile, a market analysis and strategy firm delivering market know-how to the mobile industry, offers research reports, industry maps, training courses and advisory services on under-the-radar market sectors and emerging technologies. The 100 Million Club gathers a watchlist of software companies whose products have been embedded on more than 100 million mobile handsets. The current edition, released today, features cumulative shipments up to the middle of 2010. Click here to read the complete announcement.

Express Logic Announces ThreadX RTOS Support for Energy Micro's EFM32 Gecko Microcontrollers
 
Express Logic has 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. Click here to read the entire article in BusinessWire.
 
RTOS Selection Affects Design Outcome for Medical Device Development
Selecting an overqualified real time operating system (RTOS) can affect a medical device development project’s time to market as much as selecting one that’s under qualified. Comparing design outcomes between various RTOS solutions, Jerry Krasner, Embedded Market Forecasters, offers advice for medical device developers.

Dr. Krasner observes that there are measurable factors that contribute to the appropriate choice of an operating system (or RTOS) for different medical device developments. These include time-to market, design outcomes measured by the closeness of final designs to pre-design expectations, and the need to provide an accurate CDRH audit trail for product failures that can risk the existence of the company. EMF published a detailed assessment of this issue and a set of recommendations to medical device executives and product developers. Click here for a look at a recent article by Dr. Krasner, and for some interesting data from EMF’s latest survey.

Jerry Krasner
Jerry Krasner is chief analyst and founder of Embedded Market Forecasters (www.embeddedforecast.com) and its parent company, American Technology International. With over 30 years of embedded industry experience, Krasner has extensive clinical research and medical industrial knowledge.

 

Technology Spotlight

 ThreadX Partner Solution:
SDIO Software Support for ThreadX 

 
embWiSe's embedded Secure Digital I/O (SDIO) software stack - “SDIOWorx” - is a commercial SDIO software stack that runs with our ThreadX RTOS. As a third party ISV partner of Express Logic, embWiSe now supports WLAN technologies with its SDIOWorx under our ThreadX RTOS, with support for Atheros AR6002, AR6003, and Marvell 88W8686. Data Sheets for each of these products can be downloaded via the following links:
 
  
Embedded Tidbits
 
 Preemption-Threshold Tutorial

ThreadX’s preemption-threshold technology is a unique addition to the priority based, preemptive scheduling algorithm. Preemption-threshold allows the application to disable preemption over ranges of priorities instead of disabling preemption of the entire system. Applications can take advantage of ThreadX's preemption-threshold to eliminate excessive context switching, un-deterministic priority inversion, and enhance responsiveness. Click here for the preemption-threshold tutorial.

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