RTOS supports multiprocessor DSP systems

The OSEck real-time kernel and Illuminator development tools are now available for Motorola's MSC8102 digital signal processor.

The OSEck real-time kernel and Illuminator development tools are now available for Motorola's MSC8102 digital signal processor.

The OSEck kernel and Illuminator development tools, together with the MSC8102 DSP and Metrowerks CodeWarrior Development Studio, provide an ideal platform for developing and hosting distributed multiprocessor applications such as telephony media gateways, multichannel modem banks, and 3G wireless infrastructure.

To help MSC8102 designers get started immediately, Enea will offer an OSE soft kernel simulator, which enables designers to develop their OSEck-based MSC8102 applications on a Windows or Solaris host system.

Enea will also offer a board support package for Motorola's MSC8102 ADS development board.

To simplify the design of homogeneous and heterogeneous multiprocessor networks based on the MSC8102, OSEck provides a link handler, which uses a processor- and application-independent message-passing mechanism to establish communications between multiple processes running on one or more cores (or processors).

The link handler enables processes residing on multiple cores and host processors to communicate in a seamless, transparent fashion as though they were running on the same core or processor.

The MSC8201 ADS board support package provides optimised link handler drivers for TDM, DSI, DMA, UART and shared memory interfaces.

OSEck uses the same API as the full-featured, memory-protected OSE RTOS.

This unified programming model greatly simplifies heterogeneous multiprocessor design by enabling designers to leverage the memory protection facilities of the OSE RTOS on the host processor while leveraging the deeply-embedded, hard real-time attributes of OSEck on one or more MSC8102 processors - without having to learn multiple programming environments.

Software development support for OSEck and OSE includes MetroWerks' Code Warrior Development Studio, which features RTOS-aware, freeze-mode, source-level debugging.

Complementing this freeze-mode solution is Enea's own OSE Illuminator, a run-mode system analysis and profiling tool that provides a graphical view of all processes and process information running on each node.

Illuminator lets programmers monitor, control and collect data for applications viewed as a sequence of events (such as context switches and message-passing between processes), debug multiple MSC8102 OSEck cores simultaneously, set breakpoints on events, and profile both core performance and memory usage.

"The MSC8102's four high-speed cores give it the processing power needed to handle the most compute-intensive telephony, wireless and packet processing applications", said Lynelle McKay, Vice President and General Manager of Motorola's RF and DSP Infrastructure Systems Division.

"Enea's OSEck real-time operating system provides an excellent platform for developing and deploying real-time space-constrained MSC8102 applications that can take full advantage of the MSC8102's multiple cores".

"The MSC8102 is ideal for demanding signal processing applications that rely on multiple processors working together to execute computationally intensive functions", added Nicklas Gustafson, Product Marketing Manager of Enea Embedded Technology.

"OSEck's integrated message passing facilities make it easy to distribute compute-intensive multichannel telephony, wireless and packet processing applications across multiple MSC8102 cores and processors in a way that takes full advantage of the available processing power".

The MSC8102 combines four StarCore SC140 cores running at speeds of up to 300MHz with four enhanced filter coprocessors (EFCOPs).

Featuring a peak performance of six billion multiply accumulates per second (MMACs), the MSC8102 provides a large on-chip memory (1436Kbyte), four high-speed TDM interfaces, 16-channel DMA and high-performance system and peripheral bus interfaces.

This combination of high performance, generous on-chip memory, and high-speed I/O makes the MSC8102 ideal for a wide range of compute- and I/O-intensive telecommunications applications.

OSEck is a fully pre-emptive real-time kernel with built-in error handling optimised for deeply embedded applications with tight space constraints and hard real-time requirements.

Occupying as little as 10Kbyte of memory, OSEck is fully event driven, guaranteeing fast, deterministic response to time-critical events.

To further enhance program and data memory savings, OSEck allows multiple cores to share the same execution image, and applications to share the same data.

To enhance performance, OSEck lets application processes share signal pools in memory that is accessible to each core, thereby facilitating high-speed, zero-copy signal transfers.

OSEck is available for the MSC8102 immediately from Enea Embedded Technology.

The cost for a complete development seat, including tools, starts at $ 25,000.

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