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.

Click here to read more ...

E-mail This Article

Printer-Friendly Page