News

Express Logic, Inc., the worldwide leader in royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS), today announced that Express Logic’s ThreadX® RTOS now supports the ARM® CortexTM-M3 microprocessor. This implementation of ThreadX delivers a small footprint, fast RTOS, designed specifically for deeply embedded applications based on the ARM Cortex-M3 processor. Target applications included high-volume consumer, automotive and industrial devices. ThreadX is especially appropriate for these heavily resource-constrained, microcontroller-based designs, offering low-overhead real-time responsiveness and deterministic behavior, in as little as 4K bytes of ROM or flash memory.

In addition to announcing ThreadX support for the Cortex-M3 processor, Express Logic announced that ThreadX was used extensively by ARM during the development of the Cortex-M3 processor, to validate the core and its integrated, advanced interrupt handling capabilities. Through a preliminary port of the ThreadX operating system to the Cortex-M3 processor, ARM’s engineers were able to quickly simulate extremely complex environments, substantially reducing test development times and enabling the company to release the Cortex-M3 processor ahead of schedule.

“ThreadX enabled us to test many of the operating characteristics of the Cortex-M3 processor to ensure it would perform well in the most demanding of real-time applications,” commented Haydn Povey, CPU product manager at ARM. “Express Logic has been a long-time Partner of ours, and we appreciate their help in supporting our Cortex-M3 processor development. The commercial release of ThreadX for the Cortex-M3 processor will be available to developers through Express Logic, and it can be used with our RealView® development tools.” Povey added, “With microcontroller products based on the Cortex-M3 processor expected to ship in early 2006, it is important for ARM to rapidly develop a broad supporting ecosystem for the new core, and RTOSes such as ThreadX play a critical role in this for our Partners and the device end-users.”

“We are honored that ARM elected to use our ThreadX RTOS to validate the design of their new Cortex-M3 microprocessor,” commented William E. Lamie, president of Express Logic. “ARM’s use of ThreadX shows its value as one of the most dependable and reliable RTOSes for ARM processors; ARM Partners can be confident that the combination of the Cortex-M3 processor and ThreadX has been well tested and has passed with flying colors.”

Under the terms of a development license agreement, ThreadX source code was provided to ARM for the design and validation of the Cortex-M3 processor. ThreadX development was performed using the ARM RealView® Developer Suite of tools, including its C compiler, debugger, and ICE. RealView tools provides kernel-aware debugging of ThreadX-based applications, as well as Run-Mode debugging for non-stop operation during test.

The ARM Cortex-M3 processor is the industry’s smallest and lowest power general-purpose, 32-bit microprocessor, making it ideal for a wide range of applications such as microcontrollers, low-cost wireless handsets, ZigBee and Bluetooth implementations, and automotive electronics. The Cortex-M3 processor achieves in excess of 1.2 DMIPS/MHz and integrates a powerful interrupt controller to deliver industry-leading determinism in very cost sensitive markets.

Shipping and Availability

ThreadX for the ARM Cortex-M3 processor is available now from Express Logic, with single-product, royalty-free licenses starting at $12,500 (US).