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News Release from: Lattice Semiconductor UK | Subject: LatticeMico32
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 25 October 2006
Soft microprocessor gains RTOS support
Lattice Semiconductor Corp has announced the availability of real-time operating system (RTOS) support for its LatticeMico32 open source 32bit soft microprocessor.
Lattice Semiconductor Corp has announced the availability of real-time operating system (RTOS) support for its LatticeMico32 open source 32bit soft microprocessor A port of Micrium's uC/OS-II RTOS is included with the latest version of the LatticeMico32 Development Tools, which is being released concurrently with Lattice's award-winning ispLever software design tool suite, Version 6.1
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 20 Sep 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Support allows developers to rapidly implement control systems in a design flow that builds on Lattice's open source embedded solutions approach.
The combination of the LatticeMico32 microprocessor and the uC/OS-II RTOS allows users to rapidly develop embedded systems, particularly performance sensitive real-time systems.
"The use of an RTOS helps manage the complex interactions between software tasks in an embedded system, giving our customers the ability to easily develop and manage their real-time embedded software", said Stan Kopec, Lattice Corporate Vice President of Marketing.
"We are pleased to work with Micrium to offer a port of their uC/OS-II RTOS, a very popular option with embedded systems developers, targeted for our FPGAs".
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"Using the uC/OS-II RTOS with our LatticeMico32 microprocessor core and high performance FPGAs will allow designers to experience our "More of the Best" solution philosophy first hand and reduce their time to market".
"The LatticeMico32 brings another solid microprocessor platform to the marketplace", said Jean Labrosse, President of Micrium.
"uC/OS-II complements the LatticeMico32 by enabling accelerated development of fully functional embedded designs".
"As we move forward, we are eager to serve our mutual customers with a complete embedded system solution".
The uC/OS-II is a portable, ROMable, scalable, preemptive real-time multitasking kernel (RTOS) for microprocessors, microcontrollers and DSPs.
Micrium's uC/OS-II is provided as 100% portable ANSI C source code, which can manage up to 255 tasks.
Designers can scale uC/OS-II to contain only the features they require, creating a small footprint.
For example, the uC/OS-II can be reduced to as little as 2Kbyte of code space and 200byte of data space (excluding stacks).
Further, the execution time for most of the services provided by the uC/OS-II is constant and deterministic, so that execution times are not dependant on the number of tasks running in a given application.
The LatticeMico32 core is a comprehensive, high performance and easy to use 32bit soft RISC microprocessor using the open-standard Wishbone bus and is optimised for use with Lattice Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
The footprint-efficient soft core typically requires only 2000 LUTs of FPGA logic and has a variety of configurations which trade off instruction and data caching, hardware multiplication and other core features to optimise performance and LUT utilisation.
Eight standard peripherals including memory controllers, UARTs, I/O ports and other common functions are being offered initially with the microprocessor to complete the system-on-a-chip solution.
The LatticeMico32 core is unique among the microprocessors offered by FPGA vendors because the generated microprocessor and selected peripheral HDL code are licensed under Lattice's open source license agreement.
This unique license allows users to ensure that their proprietary designs remain proprietary and allows the implementation and distribution of hardware without the need for a separate license agreement.
Additionally, the Gnu-based compiler, assembler, linker and debugger, supplied by Lattice, are released under the standard Gnu General Public Licence (GPL) agreement.
The flexible LatticeMico32 microprocessor will find application in a wide variety of markets including communications, consumer, computing, medical, industrial and automotive.
Lattice includes a port of the uC-OS-II RTOS from Micrium in its LatticeMico32 Development Tools, which are open source and free of charge.
This port is for evaluation and noncommercial use.
For commercial use, designers should obtain a licence directly from Micrium.
The LatticeMico32 Development Tools CD is shipped with the ispLever design tool suite or can be downloaded from the Lattice website.
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