Bare metal embedded software development with & without an RTOS

Joseph Coombs, Texas Instruments
EETimes (3/6/2012 8:22 PM EST)

In this Product How-To article, TI’s Joseph Coombs describes the problems developers have in meeting the strict real-time requirements of embedded systems and how use of the company’s StarterWare set of lightweight OS-independent libraries and utilities will help in designs based on TI’s ARM, DSP and ARM/DSP processors.

Despite the widespread use of high-level operating systems and software in the embedded space, many developers must take a low-level, hands-on approach to meet the strict requirements of real-time systems. In extreme cases, even a real-time operating system (RTOS) may represent unacceptable overhead. Even in more forgiving applications, developers often need low-level software to facilitate using a full OS with a particular embedded platform.

StarterWare is a set of lightweight, OS-independent software libraries and utilities that enable bare metal development on TI’s ARM, ARM + DSP, and DSP-only embedded devices. This article will describe the contents of StarterWare and how they can be used for complete application development with minimal overhead and maximum hardware access. I will also explore how StarterWare can be used in conjunction with an OS to add functionality to an existing application without assuming complete control of the overall system.

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