ITRON Newsletter No.33 (HTML Edition)

ITRON International Meeting Planned

The ITRON Technical Committee will invite interested parties to an International Meeting on ITRON to coincide with this year's Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in San Jose, California. Similar to the ITRON Supporters' Meeting held alongside last year's ESC, the meeting will be directed mainly at supporters in the United States, updating them on the current status of the ITRON project.

This ITRON International Meeting will take place near the San Jose Convention Center, site of the ESC, on Wednesday, November 4. The program for the meeting is now being put together by the ITRON Technical Committee and will be detailed in the next Newsletter. If you are planning to attend ESC, be sure to put the ITRON International Meeting on your schedule as well.

As in the past, the ITRON Technical Committee will be exhibiting at this year's ESC to publicize the ITRON specifications.

ITRON-specification Product Registration Update

Firmware Systems Inc.

The company develops and sells microcontroller-related software to order. In addition to application software, the company is involved in development tools such as C compilers and in real-time OS development. Among their products are the microcontroller development support tool Exella and real-time OS FSExRon. They also perform customizing services.

Yokogawa Digital Computer Corp.

Yokogawa Digital Computer supports the full range of corporate activities from R&D to manufacturing, based on its networking, database and real-time control hardware and software.

The ADViCE division provides embedded system development support tools essential to the research, development and designing of electronics products, contributing importantly to the growth of the industry. A relative newcomer to the industry, the company has worked its way to the top, achieving an excellent reputation both in Japan and overseas. Its aim is to continue providing ideal development environments geared to the latest microchip technology. To this end it works closely with chipmakers and with firms that make OSs and language processing systems.

ITRON-related Publications

Listed in the table are the publications prepared and issued by the ITRON Technical Committee as of June 1, 1998. They are available from the publishers indicated.

The revised edition of the µITRON3.0 Standard Handbook includes the latest version of the µITRON3.0 specification (Ver.3.02.02). Changes made between the µITRON3.0 Standard Handbook Ver.3.00.00 and Ver.3.02.00 are listed in the ITRON Standard Guidebook 2. The changes from Ver.3.02.00 to Ver.3.02.02 are limited to organizational changes and additional explanations; they do not affect the technical specifications themselves.

The ITRON-µITRON Standard Handbook is a one-volume compilation of µITRON2.0 and ITRON2 specifications. The ITRON Standard Guidebook 2 deals primarily with µITRON3.0. The earlier ITRON Standard Guidebook '92-'93 remains as a valuable reference for use with the µITRON (Ver.2.0) and ITRON2 specifications, even though the dates in its title are now past.

Hiroaki Takada (Toyohashi University of Technology), ITRON Technical Committee Secretary, gave a presentation on recent ITRON trends at the Conference portion of ESS'98, the Embedded System Solutions 1998 System LSI Solutions Fair. The event was held at the Tokyo Ryutsu Center from April 14 to 17 and sponsored by the Japan Electronic Industry Development Association (JEIDA).

The presentation took place on the 17th, the final day of the trade fair, from 3:15 to 4:45 p.m. Some 120 persons attended, far more than the room would seat. After outlining the history of the ITRON specifications and updating their current status, Takada focused on some of the latest efforts taking place in the ITRON project. He described the next-generation ITRON real-time kernel formulated in the ITRON Hard Real-time Support Study Group, and explained the approach to standardization adopted for the µITRON4.0 specification. He also introduced the ITRON TCP/IP API specification and the JTRON (Ver. 2) specification. The OHPs used for the presentation can be viewed at the ITRON Web site.

The TRON Association exhibited in a booth at the ESS'98 trade fair, centering around the µITRON specifications. Placards indicating support for the ITRON specifications were to be seen in the booths of the 13 exhibitors listed in the table. We are grateful for their cooperation.

New Products

Products recently registered with the TRON Association are introduced here.

PrKERNEL is a full-featured event-driven real-time OS, designed for RISC microprocessors.

Target chips

• SH2/SH3 (Hitachi, Ltd.)
• VR4100/VR4300 (NEC)
• TMS470R1x (Texas Instruments)
• ARM7TDMI (ARM)
• SR320/SR320S30 (Sony)

Support for other RISC chips can be realized easily.

Development environment

PrKERNEL can be used with just about any suitable development environment. Talk to Erg about using it with your own favorite system and tools.

Features

• Conforms to µITRON specification Ver. 2
  The µITRON specification was made with small-scale systems in mind. PrKERNEL is designed for ultimate compactness by allowing system call services to be added or removed as needed.
  The OS kernel has a minimum size of around 3 Kbytes; the largest configuration is approximately 18 Kbytes. An original functionality for dynamic resource creation is an ERG addition.

PrKERNEL incorporates several design features for high speed and advanced functioning, including a patented interrupt scheduler.

• Interrupt scheduler (patented)
  The interrupt handler can schedule tasks based on a software priority order.

• Avoidance of priority inversion
  A mechanism is provided for quickly getting out of a priority inversion situation, which can occur when resources are allocated.

• System trace function (for debugging)
  Functions for tracing and buffering the issuing of system calls and raising of interrupts are supported.

Benefits of adopting PrKERNEL

• Most of the kernel is developed in C language, for ready portability.
• The kernel is provided as source code, enabling customers to employ their own quality control systems.
• Products using PrKERNEL can be manufactured license-free, minimizing cost to the customer.
• Fast, reliable support is provided directly by the developer.

For more information:

Contact the developer at:

ERG CO., LTD
1-5-1 Shimo-Takaido, Suginami-ku, Tokyo 168 Japan
TEL.: 03-5376-3220  FAX: 03-5376-3230
E-mail: sales@erg.co.jp

ITRON-Related Products

This section gives brief introductions to ITRON-related development tools and middleware products that have been made available recently.

In-circuit emulator for a real-time OS: ADViCE and microVIEW-G

Yokogawa Digital Computer Corp.

The ADViCE division of Yokogawa Digital Computer provides the industry standard ADViCE series of in-circuit emulators, specialized for microcontroller software development. In the ten years since it was first put on sale, the ADViCE ICE has expanded its share of the market to the point where it now is a leading Japanese ICE, widely used in the embedded systems development field. As the demand has risen for more advanced embedded system performance and functions, the ADViCE ICE has assumed an important role for high-end microprocessor and microcontroller systems.

An increasing number of companies are adopting a real-time OS in their embedded systems. Yokogawa Digital Computer now provides the microVIEW-G C-level symbolic debugger and its upward-compatible microVIEW-G for real-time OSs, achieving even more efficient debugging with the ADViCE ICE. The microVIEW-G products provide a graphical high-level debugging interface operating on either UNIX Motif or MS-Windows hosts.

The real-time OS version of the microVIEW-G performs real-time tracing at the ICE of task transition states, indicating whether each task transition is taking place as expected and which tasks have issued which system calls. It also displays the status of each task and of OS resources (flags, mailboxes, memory, semaphores, etc.), enabling the system status to be analyzed readily. In the debugging phase for the total system including peripheral devices, the OS must be made to issue system calls to tasks. For this purpose, the debugger provides functions for issuing such system calls as task starting and task exit.

The currently supported real-time OSs are listed below.

Please contact the address indicated below about the support of other ITRON-specification OS, pSOS, and VxWorks.

For more information: