ITRON Newsletter No. 48 (HTML Edition)

The ITRON Committee was joined in November 2000 by Nihon Rational Software Corporation as an observer-status member. The up-to-date list of ITRON Committee members is given on the ITRON Web site.

The following product was registered with the ITRON-specification product registration system in the period since our last Newsletter up to December 1, 2000. See the ITRON Web site for the complete, up-to-date list of registered products.

The TRON Association promoted the ITRON specifications at a booth exhibit during MST2000, the 14th Microcomputer System & Tool Fair 2000 sponsored by Japan System House Association, which took place from Wednesday, November 15 through Friday, November 17 at the Tokyo International Exhibition Center (Tokyo Big Sight). In addition the ITRON Committee held ITRON and JTRON seminar sessions at the conference held in connection with the trade show.

Visitors to the TRON Association booth were given questionnaires for the annual survey on RTOS use trends, and were asked to answer them on the spot if possible. As a result approximately 600 attendees responded to the survey. Also, a number of exhibitors had placards in their booths indicating support for the ITRON project. We would like to express our appreciation to all who cooperated in these ways.

As in past years, the ITRON seminar was held on the last day of the conference, November 15, from 11:00 a.m. to noon. Around 200 attendees heard updates on recent standardization work going on in connection with the ITRON project. Leading off, Hiroaki Takada (ITRON Committee Secretary/Toyohashi University of Technology) presented an overview of the standardization efforts, then talked about the validation testing specification for the µITRON4.0 Specification and the status of ITRON debugging interface standardization. Masahiro Yadoguchi of Mitsubishi Electric Micro-Computer Application Software Co., Ltd., who serves as Secretary of the Device Driver Design Guideline Working Group, updated the status of studies on device driver design guidelines; and Akira Matsui of Personal Media Corporation, Secretary of the TRON GUI Specification Study Group, described progress toward drawing up the TRON GUI Specification.

In addition a JTRON seminar was held on the same day from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m., introducing the JTRON2.1 Specification released in November. Around 100 persons attended this event.

The keynote address on the opening day was given by TRON Project Leader Ken Sakamura, who spoke on embedded systems technology in the 21st century. A large number of ITRON-related technologies and products were featured in presentations at the sponsor's seminar, workshops and other events.

The 17th TRON Project Symposium and TRONSHOW2001 took place from December 5 to 7 at the Tokyo Design Center (Gotanda). In one of the tutorial sessions, ITRON Committee chair Kiichiro Tamaru (Toshiba Corporation) presented an update on recent standardization work going on in the ITRON subproject. There were also a number of ITRON-presentations by exhibiting companies.

Nucleus µiPLUS

Nucleus µiPLUS is a real-time OS for embedded systems, implementing the µITRON4.0 Standard Profile (with support also for some extended functions).

Nucleus µiPLUS was jointly developed by Accelerated Technology, Inc. and Grape Systems based on Accelerated's high-performance, function-rich real-time multi-tasking OS Nucleus PLUS, as an extended-function version conforming to the µITRON specification. Customers using Nucleus µiPLUS have access to the interfaces of the fully native Nucleus PLUS. This means instant availability of all the add-on products of Accelerated Technology, Inc., including those for networking, graphics, file system support, and Web browsing. As with other Nucleus products, they are offered royalty-free and complete with source code.

For more information

For information on this product lineup please contact info@nucleus.grape.co.jp. Also visit the company's Web site at http://nucleus.grape.co.jp.

ELX-ITRON

Elmic Systems developed ELX-ITRON as a real-time OS implementing the µITRON3.0 specification. ELX-ITRON supports the Level S functions in the specification along with some of the Level E functions. Among the original functions are a mutex function and I/O driver management. The advanced functionality is achieved along with fast processing and compact size.

Features

• Fast processing

  Since kernel processing is performed by system call functions themselves, going from the task level to the kernel level is very fast. Interrupts are enabled for all kernel processing other than interrupt handling, for fast interrupt response. System call parameter checks can be disabled, reducing overhead by around 10 percent.

• Compact size

  The system call functions that perform kernel processing are provided in library form. Only the functions actually used by tasks are linked at system generation, limiting the size of memory for kernel use to the minimum necessary. Eliminating system call parameter checking reduces memory by around 10 percent.

• Debugging support

  Standard provision is made of a system task for referencing system states (CCT: console communication task). Use of this CCT makes it possible to reference the states of tasks, event flags and other objects without stopping the system. Also provided are functions for starting and stopping tasks, enabling the debugging of individual tasks.

• Logging function

  Log data can be collected for events such as system call issuing and interrupt occurrence. The user can designate the logging points for use in performance checking.

• I/O driver management

  ELX-ITRON adopts an I/O driver approach in order to separate hardware access from task processing. Tasks issue I/O requests to an I/O driver. Hardware changes are dealt with by replacing the I/O driver. DIC (Device Interface Component) registration is also supported. ELX-ITRON comes with timer and terminal drivers as standard provision. The terminal driver is mainly used to control the serial controller in the CPU and to perform ASCII character string input and output. One of its applications is for output of task debugging information.

• Mutex function

  The mutex function is intended for exclusion control. Supporting priorit inheritance control and priority ceiling protocol, it prevents the proble of priority inversion.

Supported CPUs

Hitachi, Ltd.	SH3 (SH7708, SH7709), SH2 (SH7045, SH7615)
ARM	ARM7/Thumb
(Please contact Elmic Systems regarding additional CPU support)

For more information

Elmic Systems, Inc.
TEL: 045-664-5171
FAX: 045-650-1021 (G4)

This newsletter is a special edition for WWW of the one appeared in TRONWARE vol.67.

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