uC/OS-II
- Thomas Watteyne
uC/OS-II is a preemptive multitasking real-time kernel developed by Micrium. It consists of 80 API calls, which organize an application into several tasks (threads of execution) which coordinate their execution through by using primitive such as semaphores and event flags.
uC/OS-II has received multiple third-party certifications for avionics, medical and industrial applications. It has become the de-facto real-time kernel for safety-critical embedded applications.
uC/OS-II comes as a pre-compiled library as part of the
On-Chip Software Development Kit
.The pre-compiled uC/OS-II library included in the
On-Chip Software Development Kit
is fully licensed. That is, you do not need to purchase a uC/OS-II license when developing code on theLTC5800
using theOn-Chip Software Development Kit
.
Your application has full access to the uC/OS-II kernel. While this allows your application to take full advantage of a uC/OS-II API, a typical application can consist only of a handful of threads using simple semaphores to coordinate execution.
The uC/OS-II library shipped with the
On-Chip Software Development Kit
has been customized to ensure low-power operation. While the customization does not affect the way your application interacts with it, it does ensure that theLTC5800
chip is automatically put into low-power state when no task is executing.Your application is not aware of these optimizations. In particular, your application does not have to do anything for the chip to go into low-power state, since this is handled entirely by the uC/OS-II library.
All sample applications in the Cookbook are implemented as uC/OS-II threads, and can serve as a good starting point if you are unfamiliar with uC/OS-II.
To learn more about uC/OS-II, we recommend the book "uC/OS-II: The Real-Time Kernel, 2nd Edition" by Jean J. Labrosse, available at http://micrium.com.