10 October 2008

Micrium Ports Portfolio To ARM Cortex

Micrium, a member of the ARM Connected Community, has confirmed that a that nearly all of its embedded software products have been ported to the ARM Cortex-M1 and Cortex-M3 processors.

Compatible offerings now include uC/OS-II (complete with the recently introduced memory protection unit (MPU) package), uC/TCP-IP, uC/USB and uC/FS, the company said.

“Given ARM’s focus on meeting the requirements of a small core footprint, code density that enables smaller memories, reduced pin count and low power consumption, Micrium’s embedded system components are a strong fit for the Cortex-M processor series,” said Eric Schorn, VP Marketing, Processors Division, ARM. “Micrium has ported many of its embedded products to the ARM architecture, including uC/OS-II, which was used during the initial verification of the Cortex-M3 and the Cortex-M1 processors.”

The Cortex-M processor series architecture enables the Micrium kernel to benefit from new instructions available to speed up context switching and task scheduling. In addition, Micrium’s complete solution includes a modular DO-178B Level A certifiable uC/OS-MPU, which can be added to projects as required.

“Micrium has aggressively worked with ARM to support the Cortex-M1 and Cortex-M3 processors,” said Jean Labrosse, president and CEO of Micrium. “We were one of the earliest RTOS suppliers to port to the Cortex-M processor series, which has proven highly amenable to the requirements of modern embedded software. Our uC/ suite of embedded system components deliver small footprints and the absolute minimum use of system requirements, making them a very strong fit for the Cortex-M processor series.”

ARM Cortex-M1 and Cortex-M3 processors provide an ideal platform for Micrium’s uC/Probe embedded system monitoring tool, as monitoring code is not required in the target device. Since the processor’s serial wire debug (SWD) does not interfere with CPU operation, or halt the CPU when obtaining or setting variables in the target, it enables real-time viewers like uC/Probe to provide close to real-time data to its user.