Excuse Me For Interrupting

March 1, 2004

Hard real-time operating systems help designers meet hard goals. Keeping interrupt latency low is only one of the ways that hard RTOSs make a difference. Reservation-based RTOSs make it easier to guarantee that jobs get done on time and that resources...

William G. Wong

Interrupt: Did you know that Electronic Design recently launched an online trade show to cover power systems? Check out www.powerdesign365.com for details.

Time is just one of those resources. Memory and even file handles aren't available in an unlimited supply in most embedded applications. The job of managing a system becomes more complex as the number of tasks increases.

Complexity is only one issue that programmers will have to contend with.

Interrupt: The Bus & Board Conference in January had a host of new products and technology announcements. Check out some of

Interrupt: LynuxWorks (www.lynuxworks.com) incorporated the latest 2.6 Linux kernel into BlueCat Linux 5.0. It was qualified using ISO 9001:2000 procedures and test.

the latest board products in the Bus and Board section (right).

Another is software patents. Most developers have yet to run into the patent briar, but it will become a more common occurrence as the number of software patents continues to rise. Unfortunately, a great number of

Interrupt: The Eclipse Foundation has taken over the reins of the open-source Eclipse development platform. More details can be found at www.eclipse.org.

these innovations would not make it into the patent portfolio, except for the difficulty of finding prior art. Even more critical is that patents must avoid being non-obvious to "a skilled practitioner of the art." As most developers know, all programmers are not alike. Just take RTOS reservation systems

Interrupt: It's not a reservation-based RTOS, but Zilog's tiny 18-kbyte RZK is a real-time, pre-emptive, multitasking kernel. It targets Zilog's eZ80Acclaim! and it is royalty-free.

as an example. Anyone unfamiliar with this technique would have a tough time evaluating a software patent in this area. Almost time for another...

About the Author

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

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.