News

Express Logic, Inc., the worldwide leader in royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS) with over 300 million deployments, today announced that its ThreadX® RTOS scored highly in the 2006 CMP Media “State of Embedded Market Survey,” of 1,217 embedded developers. ThreadX ranked especially high among general-purpose, hard real-time operating systems for ARM, MIPS, and ColdFire 32-bit architectures, based on data from the survey, conducted in March, 2006. The CMP survey measured RTOS use through questions posed to a large group of embedded developers, comprised of attendees of the Embedded Systems Conferences, and subscribers to EE Times, Embedded Systems Europe, and Embedded Systems Design publications.

A key survey question asked developers, “Which operating system do you currently use?” Results from developers who indicated that they were using 32-bit architectures based on ARM, MIPS, or Freescale’s ColdFire responded as shown in the chart at the right. Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS ranked near the top with a 12% average response. The highest-ranking general purpose hard real-time OS was Wind River’s VxWorks with a 20% response, followed by ThreadX which ranked #2. Other operating systems that are not considered here as general-purpose hard real-time OSes, such as Red Hat Linux, TI’s DSP/BIOS, Microsoft Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded received responses between 13 and 28 percent.

The survey shows that ThreadX use among ARM, MIPS, and ColdFire developers is greater than that of many competitive RTOSes, including Nucleus (10%), eCOS (7%), INTEGRITY (5%), and RTXC (2%). In addition, ThreadX outpaced several Linux distributions including Monta Vista Linux (8%), FSM Labs’ RT Linux (4%), and LynuxWorks’ BlueCat Linux (2%).

“These developer survey results show a strong, increasingly successful penetration of ThreadX into the 32-bit embedded systems market,” commented John Carbone, vice president of marketing of Express Logic. “ThreadX is gaining in popularity, and is now deployed in over 300 million electronic products worldwide, including HP inkjet printers and digital cameras, Marvell and Broadcom SoCs for wireless networking, and Welch Allyn portable patient monitors. This survey shows that developers are more likely to choose ThreadX than many competing RTOS products.”

Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS is a small-footprint, fast, royalty-free real-time operating system that is ideal for high volume, resource constrained devices requiring hard real-time responsiveness and fast time to market. ThreadX runs on 32-bit microprocessor architectures from ARM, MIPS, and Freescale, as well as those from ARC, Analog Devices, Altera, AMCC, Renesas, and Xilinx.

Shipping and Availability

ThreadX is available in full source code form, royalty free, for most popular 32-bit architectures, at license prices starting at $12,500.