Dusseldorf, 25. November 2011 - Renesas Electronics Europe, a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the availability of the µC/OS-III, a highly efficient and reliable real-time kernel from Micriµm, for Renesas’ V850E2/Mx4 series of microcontrollers (MCUs). With the µC/OS-III, system designers have an intuitive framework for developing multitask applications that take advantage of the V850E2/Mx4’s impressive capabilities.

Renesas’ V850E2/Mx4 series of MCUs comprises both single and dual core devices with high processing performance of 2.56 Dhrystone MIPS per megahertz (MHz) per core, which is 1.4 times higher than the company’s previous V850E2M core. By using the dual core device, embedded system designers can benefit from the world’s leading processing performance of 1024 DMIPS at a clock speed of 200 MHz, while still maintaining low power consumption of 0.88 milliwatts (mW) per Dhrystone MIPS, which is 60 percent less compared to using only one core. In addition, the V850E2/Mx4 CPU core extends its floating point units (FPUs) to facilitate greater accuracy and range in floating point numbers, making it suitable for information appliances that require high-speed data processing or complex algorithm calculations.

As well as high performance, the V850E2/Mx4 MCUs also provide resource protection for illegal access and timing supervision functions, such as memory protection unit (MPU), peripheral protection unit (PPU), system register protection (SRP) and timing supervision unit (TSU), making it an ideal platform for the µC/OS-III, which is similarly well equipped for safety-critical applications.

After years of kernel evolution, the µC/OS-III was written according to the same demanding standards that governed the development of its highly popular predecessor, the µC/OS-II. Both kernels feature clean source code and are documented in informative, easy-to-understand books, rather than standard reference manuals. 

System designers working with Renesas’ V850E2/Mx4 series of MCUs can now include the µC/OS-III kernel in their products to enhance the range of features available while reducing development time and cost. As Renesas’ V850E2/Mx4 MCUs deliver a high level of processing performance, the µC/OS-III kernel is able to run multiple high-priority tasks at the same time. The foundation of µC/OS-III is its optimised task manager which supports both pre-emptive and round-robin scheduling. Complementing this scheduler are a multitude of helpful kernel objects, including semaphores, mutual exclusion algorithms, message queues, event flags, and timers, all of which aid developers in the implementation of powerful multitask applications. Combined with the performance of the Renesas’ V850E2/Mx4 MCUs, these features provide systems designers with faster time-to-market and a significant competitive edge when developing high-end embedded products for a variety of applications.