Micrium and Renesas Electronics deliver new embedded-system design book with MCU board

Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2010, WESTON, USA: Embedded-system engineers designing with Renesas Electronics’ SuperH microcontrollers (MCUs) and Micrium’s uC/OS-III real-time kernel and operating systems (RTOS) middleware will now have access to an informative “how-to” guide.

Micrium and Renesas Electronics will bring to Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley (ESC SV) a new book, uC/OS-III: The Real-Time Kernel, a two-part volume that is packaged with a companion board that uses Renesas Electronics’ SH7216 device, a 32-bit 200MHz/400DMIPS superscalar microcontroller with a double precision FPU, Ethernet, USB, CAN and 1MB flash memory.

The book will be available for viewing at ESC Silicon Valley in San Jose, California, April 27 to 29, in the Renesas Electronics booth #2002 and in Micrium’s booth #2202. In addition, a demonstration will take place in the Renesas Electronics booth of select exercises included in the book.

"My intent when writing this book was to place into the hands of embedded design engineers not just a basic understanding of underlying RTOS technology, but also hands-on instruction and experience in making it work," said Jean Labrosse, Micrium president and CEO. "This collaboration with Renesas Electronics delivers all of the necessary elements to be up and running quickly with our respective powerful technologies, along with our joint commitment to educating engineers as designs continue to become increasingly complex."

The book represents an in-depth description of the internals of the uC/OS-III real-time kernel. Micrium and Renesas Electronics collaborated on examples of the use of the uC/OS-III and the SH7216 MCU in Part II of the book. The "hands on" aspect includes access to uC/TCP-IP, uC/FS (File System), and uC/Probe, which enables the user to "see" the results of their code running in real time.

Renesas Electronics’ SH7216 companion board clocks the MCU at 192MHz and offers features such as IEEE1588-compliant 10/100Mbps Ethernet, USB device, RS-232C, Micro-SD card slot, 3D accelerometer, character LCD, and multiple LEDs arranged to emulate motor control, among many other features.

The board also includes on-board debugger circuitry to allow debugging and programming of the SH7216 MCU using just a USB cable. The SH7216 board is designed to facilitate custom prototypes using the on-board I/O expansion headers. The online installation files include Renesas Electronics’ High-performance Embedded Workshop (HEW), a full function evaluation compiler (256KB, size limited after 90 days) and several application examples.

"Renesas Electronics and Micrium had two primary goals in creating this book-plus-system-board package," said Ali Sebt, Vice President, Consumer and Industrial Business Unit, Renesas Electronics America Inc.

"We wanted to simplify and facilitate the application of SuperH microcontrollers, and wanted to help customers build the highest possible level of quality into their system designs. If we’ve been successful in meeting these objectives, engineers will enjoy using the system development resources the package delivers and will be able to put them to good use easily, again and again."