RTOS, real-time interrupt latency, PIC

Latest RTOS version targets 16 bit microcontrollers

News Release from: AVIX-RT
28/03/2008

AVIX-RT, a manufacturer of embedded software solutions, has announced the availability of version 2.2 of its RTOS AVIX-16. AVIX-16 is an RTOS targeting 16 bit microcontrollers belonging to the Microchip PIC24F, PIC24H, dsPIC30F and dsPIC33F families.

AVIX-16 builds upon the powerful architecture of those microcontrollers and offers a number of unique features the most advanced being its interrupt handling mechanism. AVIX-16 offers an interrupt model which does never disable hardware interrupts leading to not adding a single cycle to the interrupt latency as specified by the hardware. As a result, using AVIX-16, interrupt latency equals that of the hardware while still offering full integration and communication between the interrupt handlers and the threads running under control of AVIX-16. This unique feature makes AVIX-16 deserve its title of zero latency RTOS.

Related to interrupt handling, AVIX-16 offers a system stack mechanism for use by interrupt handlers. This mechanism allows interrupt handlers to use a private stack, lowering the load on the stack of each thread. In contrast with the approach followed by competing products, AVIX-16 fully takes over the interrupt code, not relying on code generated by the compiler. As a result, the load placed on the stacks of individual threads is much lower than is the case with competing products. This results in AVIX-16 using ~2KB less RAM on an average application compared to competing products.

For testing and validation, AVIX-16 offers Real Time Thread Activation Tracing, a non-intrusive mechanism showing the activation of threads on a logic analyzer. This mechanism is usable both during development and in the end-product and offers unprecedented insight in you applications behavior.

Beside these unique features, AVIX-16 offers everything you may expect from a modern RTOS like mutexes, semaphores, pipes, timers, message queues and event flags. All this functionality is accessible trough a user friendly and largely type safe API allowing programming errors to be found compile time instead of runtime.

Finally, based on the open source performance test ThreadMetric, AVIX-16 proves to be the fastest RTOS for the targeted microcontrollers in four out of seven tests this test suite is composed of. A graphical result of the benchmark is show in the figure below.

AVIX-16 can be downloaded in a free demo version from the AVIX-RT website. AVIX-16 is accompanied by a comprehensive user manual.