Product category:
Embedded Software and Operating Systems
News Release from: Enea Embedded Technology | Subject: OSEck for Freescale's MSC8144
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 18 May 2006
RTOS rides with new Freescale multicore
DSP
Enea has announced the availability of its OSEck real-time operating system (RTOS) for Freescale's MSC8144 multicore digital signal processor.
Enea has announced the availability of its OSEck real-time operating system (RTOS) for Freescale's MSC8144 multicore digital signal processor The OSEck RTOS, optimised for signal processing applications, takes full advantage of the MSC8144's multicore architecture and high-speed packet processing capabilities
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 29 Aug 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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OSEck also provides high-performance message-based Linx interprocess communications (IPC) services, which greatly simplify the design of complex telecom infrastructure applications spanning multiple MSC8144 cores and processors.
"The MSC8144's four DSP cores offer tremendous raw processing performance, and provide an attractive platform for deploying complex distributed telecom infrastructure applications requiring high-speed media packet processing", said Nicklas Gustafson, Director of Product Management at Enea.
"OSEck's hard real-time response, memory management support, development tools and LINX IPC services greatly simplify the design, debugging, deployment and management of secure, high-availability telecom applications distributed across multiple cores, processors, and operating systems".
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The MSC8144 is a high-performance, TCP/IP-enabled, multicore device for network communication infrastructure devices such as 3G and WiMAX radio basestations, radio network controllers, voice and video media gateways.
Delivering a peak performance of up to 16 billion multiply-accumulate operations (16 x 16) per second, the MSC8144 integrates four high-performance SC3400 DSP subsystems based on StarCore technology.
Each core is equipped with a hardware memory management unit, 16Kbyte instruction cache and 32Kbyte of data cache.
The MSC8144's dual RISC-based QUICC Engine technology supports dual Gigabit Ethernet and ATM interfaces, which offload the DSP cores by handling network protocol processing.
The MSC8144 also features 128Kbyte of shared L2 cache, 512Kbyte of shared M2 SRAM, 10Mbyte of shared M3 memory, a 200MHz DDR DRAM controller, eight 256-bidirectional TDM channels, a PCI interface, and a Serial RapidIO interface.
"Enea's OSEck is a very powerful and feature rich real-time operating system, tuned to meet the specific requirements of Freescale's multicore DSP-based systems", said Lynelle McKay, Vice President and General Manager of Freescale's Digital Systems Division.
"It enables telecom and wireless OEMs to fully utilise the capabilities of the MSC8144, to build sophisticated, easy to use and highly robust systems based on Freescale's StarCore DSPs and PowerQUICC processors".
OSEck (OSE compact kernel) is a DSP-optimised version of the full-featured OSE RTOS.
Occupying less than 10Kbyte of memory (in a minimal configuration), OSEck delivers fully pre-emptive, event-driven real-time response with a context switching speed of 300ns and a worst-case interrupt latency of 1us.
To enhance reliability, OSEck provides full support for the MSC8144's spin locks, which prevent multiple cores from accessing the same critical data simultaneously.
OSEck also provides built-in error detection and handling.
OSEck's message-based Linx IPC services provide the framework for establishing transparent communications between application processes running on multiple MSC8144 cores.
Utilising high-performance, zero-copy shared memory data transfers, Linx greatly simplifies distributed design, enabling applications running on multiple cores to interact as if they were running on a single core.
This transparency also enhances scalability, enabling designers to add new nodes with minimal impact on existing application code.
OSEck provides an ideal run-time platform for stand-alone MSC8144 systems.
But it is also an integral part of Enea's Network Application Services Platform (NASP), a telecom-in-a-box solution for developing and deploying distributed telecom applications spanning multiple processors (ie MSC8144, CPUs, other DSPs), operating systems (ie OSEck, Linux, other RTOSs) and interconnects (ie Gigabit Ethernet, PCI, RapidIO, shared memory).
The NASP platform combines Enea's OSEck and OSE RTOSs (Enea's full-featured RTOS for 32/64bit CPUs) with Carrier Grade Linux, high-availability middleware (Element), a fault-tolerant database (Polyhedra), and Eclipse-based development tools.
Development support for OSEck includes an RTOS-aware source-level debugger that enables programmers to debug all four MSC8144 cores simultaneously with support for run-mode and freeze-mode debug, and post-mortem analysis capabilities.
OSEck also features a high-level analysis tool that enables MSC8144 designers to study system details such as OSEck process/task information, CPU and memory profiling, task switching, stack and memory usage.
A single-seat developer's licence for OSEck running on MSC8144 cores starts at $8000.
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