Small RTOS Drives Cortex-M3/M4

April 12, 2013

CMX is delivering its line of operating systems and middleware to the Arm Cortex-M3/M4 environment.

Design West 2013

CMX is well known for its compact, reliable operating sytems and protocol stacks. Developers can now get a pair of CMX real-time operating systems, three TCP/IP stacks, five Flash File Systems and USB stacks for Arm Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 microcontrollers. The software works with a variety of \tool chains including IAR, KEIL, Codewarrior, GNU, and Rowley.

CMX-RTX is a full feature, preemptive, multi-tasking RTOS. It includes support for tasks, messages, queues, events, memory management, resource management, semaphores, and timer management. CMX-RTX comes with a Windows application which simplifies RTOS configuration (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. The CMX configuration program provides an easy interface for setting up the CMX RTOS.

The CMX-Tiny+ RTOS targets small memory microcontrollers. It needs as little as 512 bytes of RAM and 1 Kbytes of flash. The modular kernel is compact but it is based on the CMX-RTX. Even the full version of CMX-Tiny+ uses 3 Kbytes of memory.

Both RTOS products work with the range of middleware. For example, CMX-MicroNet is a TCP/IP stack with low flash and RAM requirements. It supports standard protocols including UDP, TCP, IP, Modem, SLIP, ICMP Echo, IGMP and Virtual File system. Options include SSL/TLS, an HTTP web server, a DNS client, a DHCP Client, a TFTP Client, along with FTP, SMTP, SNMP, SNTP, POP3, and PPP support.

The next step up is CMX-TCP/IP. It is a full-featured, 100% RFC compliant, TCP/IP stack. It handles virtually all TCP/IP protocols.

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William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

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