Imperas and Micrium ease embedded software development for systems using μC/OS-II RTOS

THAME, ENGLAND: Imperas announced a flow with Micrium Inc. focused on enabling more productive and higher quality embedded software development with the Micrium μC/OS-II Real-Time Operating System (RTOS).

With firmware and application software development taking the majority of the resources for developing embedded systems, creating new flows for embedded software development is increasingly important. The Imperas flow with Micrium’s μC/OS-II makes it easier to use the Open Virtual Platforms (OVP) open source models for the development of embedded systems.

Nuum Design developed a demonstration of the OVP- μC/OS-II flow with an avionic application, available through the Nuum page on the OVP website, consisting of a flight management system for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV).

This demo system was built on a virtual prototype consisting of an ARM7 processor core, UART, timer and a math co-processor implementing the CORDIC (COordinate Rotation Digital Computer) algorithm commonly used in navigation systems.

Nuum Design, who is also expert with Micrium products, ported the μC/OS-II RTOS on the virtual platform and met the application requirements to support avionic-certified RTOS. A navigation screen is part of the demo applications, displaying the UAV flight parameters, and traces GPS coordinates onto Google Earth in real-time.

“Thanks to OVP, we were able to prove that using virtual platform technologies to design embedded systems is productive in avionics systems. As a result, Nuum sees OVP as an asset that promotes Nuum’s mission to help companies adopt ESL technologies,” said Maxime de Nanclas, CEO of Nuum Design. This virtual platform can be requested from Nuum Design. Developers interested in the μC/OS-II RTOS can get that from the Micrium website.

“Software is the key differentiator for today’s embedded systems, and we need to make it easier to develop embedded systems,” said Jean Labrosse, president of Micrium. “Virtual platforms are fast becoming accepted by mainstream developers as an excellent way to accelerate software development, and we are excited that Imperas and Nuum Design have provided a flow that enables users to run our μC/OS-II RTOS on OVP virtual platforms.”

A virtual platform is a set of models and a simulation engine that enables the same software binaries that would run on the hardware to be executed on a software, or virtual, platform. Because instruction-accurate models do not require the full implementation details of the hardware, they can be more easily and quickly developed, enabling software development to start months before any hardware is available.

In addition, software development on virtual platforms offers the benefit of simulation of any system: full visibility and controllability, unlike the limited access that hardware provides as a software development environment. Further benefits of virtual platforms include real-time simulation speed of hundreds of millions of instructions per second, and deterministic behavior, enabling simulation runs to be repeated.

“We use the μC/OS-II RTOS on Open Virtual Platforms virtual platforms with ARM 7 and ARM 9 processor core models,” said Andreas Gerstlauer, assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “We’ve found OVP virtual platforms to be fast and easy to use, and a great tool for embedded systems research. That the models are open source is an added benefit.”

“Software simulation, or virtual platforms, are becoming a commonly used tool for embedded software development,” said Simon Davidmann, president and CEO, Imperas and founding director of the OVP initiative. “Making it easier to get started with virtual platforms by providing support for the most popular operating systems such as μC/OS-II provides great value to the OVP and embedded systems communities.”