µC/OS-II Real-Time Kernel

The µC/OS-II real-time kernel was developed in the 1990's. It is used in many different industries. This real-time kernel is particularly popular in the safety-critical environment, because the source code is written in a comprehensible manner and is well documented.

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Delimitation of applications

µC/OS-II has proven itself in a wide variety of applications within safety-critical areas and has been awarded several certifications according to the respective standards from avionics (DO178-B), the medical field (FDA-510k) and industry (ISO68501).

In safety-relevant projects, the requirement to separate critical and non-critical functions is a way to facilitate certification. To this end, we offer an environment (µC/OS-MMU), which with the help of a Memory Management Unit (MMU) or Memory Protection Unit (MPU), facilitates different critical functions on one CPU.

> more information about μC/OS-MMU

Memory protection of tasks

Across industries, embedded system developers are increasingly appreciating the opportunity to shorten the development time with protected memory areas for tasks. For this, we offer a µC/OS-II extension (µC/OS-MPU), which is conceptually optimized for embedded systems. The extension supports the integrated memory protection mechanism of modern controllers. This can be a Memory Management Unit (MMU) or Memory Protection Unit (MPU).

> more information about μC/OS-MPU

Automotive add-on

In automotive projects, a OSEK/VDX-compatible real-time kernel is often required. So we can also offer the µC/OS-II qualities in line with this requirement, we have created a system that combines both worlds: µC/OSEK.

> more information about µC/OSEK

Features of µC/OS-II

Source code

The kernel is supplied as source code. A significant amount of energy was put into the source code to achieve a high-quality product. The source code is compact, consistent, well documented and well organized. It is often the case that simply passing on the source code is not sufficient. The knowledge of how the source code works and how the modules work together is also important.

Multitasking

Like most of the real-time kernels on the market, µC/OS-II is also a full-fledged, preemptive multitasking kernel, i.e. the task with the highest priority and 'ready' status is executed. Up to 254 tasks with specific priorities can be managed.

Portability

Most of µC/OS-II is written in ANSI-C and can thus be translated with any cross-compiler. The CPU-dependent part, which must be written in assembler, was kept to a minimum. This simplifies the necessary adaptations of µC/OS-II to new process architectures.

Scalability

The kernel was designed for embedded systems. With any development environment (C-compiler, assembler and linker), the kernel becomes part of the application. The source code was created in such a way that the only services integrated into the application are those that are required. For this reason, the memory requirement (in RAM and ROM) can be adjusted according to the respective product or hardware.

Services

The kernel provides a wide range of functions: semaphores, mutual-exclusion semaphores, event flags, message mailboxes, message queues, memory management, task management and timer management. The runtimes of most functions and services are deterministic, i.e. the runtime is constant. Only OSTimeTick() and some event-flag functions are dependent on the number of generated tasks.