Multithreading RTOS for industry-leading 16-bit controllers

ThreadX® Microcontroller Edition RTOS,
“ThreadX®/MCU,” is now available for the 16-bit PIC24 microcontrollers
(MCUs) and dsPIC® digital signal controllers (DSCs) from Microchip
Technology Inc.

Through a cooperative effort with
Microchip, Express Logic has created ThreadX/MCU and made it upward
compatible with the 32-bit version. The operating system provides full
preemptive scheduling, interrupt management, message passing, thread
synchronization, resource locking, event management and timer control;
and supports up to 10 threads, queues, timers, mutexes, event flag
groups, and block and byte pools.

The operating system resides in a small
memory footprint of 1.6K bytes, and delivers low-overhead operations
that execute in 50 to 150 clock cycles, leaving more CPU cycles for an
application.

Microchip’s PIC24 MCU and dsPIC DSC
family consists of the PIC24F, PIC24H, dsPIC30, and dsPIC33, all 16-bit
controllers with flexible memory technologies and comprehensive,
easy-to-use development tools.

ThreadX/MCU works with Microchip’s MPLAB® development tools. It includes:
• In-circuit debuggers, ranging from affordable and functional to fast and feature-rich
• Extensive stimulus capability
• ‘C’ compilers, assemblers and linkers, with free student editions
• Graphical peripheral initialization tool (MPLAB VDI)
The
MPLAB IDE provides kernel-awareness for the ThreadX/MCU RTOS, for
insight into the status and operation of applications using
ThreadX/MCU. The program is pre-configured to work with MPLAB
out-of-the-box.
Under license from Express Logic, Microchip plans
to sell ThreadX/MCU to its customers through direct and online sales
channels.