News

Express Logic, Inc., the worldwide leader in royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS), today announced that the results of the 2008 Embedded Market Forecasters (EMF) study of embedded developers revealed that Express Logic’s ThreadX® RTOS continued to excel in helping customers achieve rapid time-to-market. As in the 2007 study, the 2008 data shows that developers who used ThreadX, achieved a higher percentage of on-time or ahead-of-schedule results for their last project compared to those using another RTOS. According to the survey, developers using ThreadX completed their projects on-time or ahead of schedule over 76% of the time, as opposed to the industry average of 56.1%. Other RTOSes, including Linux, did not fare as well as ThreadX.

Dr. Jerry Krasner, Ph.D., MBA, and President of Embedded Market Forecasters commented, “ThreadX continues to lead in time-to-market year after year as evidenced by the 2008 EMF survey of embedded developers. Over 76% of ThreadX designs are on or ahead of schedule, far better than the results reported from those who used other operating systems. We also looked at the number of lines of code and found that ThreadX and Linux are about the same (350k) while the others average larger numbers. Nobody else was close to achieving this project completion rate—not the big guys, the Linux folks, or other RTOS vendors. The closest to ThreadX was MS-XPE at 68.4% on or ahead of schedule. Everyone else falls in the 60% or below ahead-of-schedule range, while ThreadX stands at 76%.”

The EMF survey queried all developers about the percentage of their embedded projects that finished on or ahead of schedule. When their responses are correlated with the RTOSes that their projects used, the EMF survey indicates that ThreadX exceeds industry average for projects completed on or ahead of schedule by nearly 20%. The following chart clearly indicates the superior completion rate enjoyed by those using ThreadX:

Not coincidentally, ThreadX total number of product deployments now totals in excess of 600 million units. Led by HP’s use of ThreadX in their line of inkjet and All-In-One printers and Broadcom and Marvell’s use of ThreadX in wireless networking SoCs, ThreadX consistently ranks among the most widely deployed operating systems for embedded devices. Thanks to its royalty-free licensing model, Express Logic's ThreadX has been used in millions of high-volume products across multiple consumer and industrial markets. ThreadX powers a wide variety of products from entertaining consumer electronics to life-saving medical devices, as outlined below.

“In the past year, ThreadX deployments were accompanied by increases in our networking and USB products,” commented William E. Lamie, president of Express Logic. “In 2008, our volume deployment is largely due to the explosive growth of Bluetooth and 802.11 wireless networking applications in Smartphones and PDAs that use ThreadX for RF communications.”

ThreadX is Express Logic’s small-footprint, fast, royalty-free RTOS for demanding real-time applications. Its royalty-free business model makes ThreadX extremely attractive for high-volume devices. Equally important is the ease-of-use that enables ThreadX-powered devices to get to market on time and within budget, leading to high levels of success in the marketplace and the resulting high production volumes.

Lamie adds, “These deployment volumes and ahead of schedule project completions illustrate the rock-solid reliability of ThreadX, and the value of real ease-of-use in achieving rapid time to market. Without bullet-proof high reliability and the ease-of-use that enables speedy development and fast time-to-market, such production volume would never be economically achievable. We’re very proud that ThreadX has proven to be so easy to use and reliable that many of our customers’ products have reached such high-volume production.”

Shipping and Availability

ThreadX is available in full source code form, royalty-free, with project license prices starting at $12,500.