Avnet Electronics Intros RTOS Support for Xilinx PowerPC 440 Processor

Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet and Express Logic, announced that its ThreadX RTOS now supports the PowerPC 440 processor embedded in Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs. Immersed directly into the Xilinx Virtex FPGA fabric to implement high-performance embedded applications, the IBM (News - Alert) PowerPC 440 core is a hard 32-bit RISC CPU processor.

 

The developers who use Xilinx (News - Alert) FPGA solutions will now get the most technically advanced multitasking solution on the market today with Express Logic's ThreadX RTOS. Express Logic's picokernel design results in very high-performance and extremely small memory requirements — as small as 3Kbytes to meet extreme size constraints. ThreadX also provides applications that use Xilinx’s PowerPC embedded processor cores with considerable technical innovations which includes fast software timers and a mechanism to help reduce context switching called preemption-threshold.

 

ThreadX is the smallest, fastest, lowest cost commercial RTOS that addresses to the deeply embedded applications in consumer electronics, medical devices, automotive electronics, and industrial control. ThreadX is ideal for high-volume products where manufacturing cost must be held to an absolute minimum as the solution is royalty free.

 

Making available the Avnet Virtex-5 FX30T Evaluation Kit as well as the Xilinx Virtex-5 FX70T Embedded Kit (ML507 board), ThreadX support for the PowerPC440 processor on Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs was jointly developed with Avnet Electronics Marketing. ThreadX support for the Xilinx MicroBlaze soft processor core and PowerPC 405 was first announced Express Logic, a member of the Xilinx AllianceEmbedded Program, in 2003. Developers can now optimize their processor choice based on their ThreadX-supported application requirements as they can ask for either MicroBlaze, PowerPC405 or PowerPC440 architectures.

 

Virtex-5 embedded PowerPC 440 users can now use full suite of Express Logic offerings which includes the NetX Duo IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack TCP/IP network stack, FileX file management system, and PegX graphics development toolkit. ThreadX works with the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK), V10.1i, which includes a complete set of GNU-based software development tool. ThreadX for the Xilinx Virtex-5 embedded PowerPC processor is available at prices starting at $12,500 for a single product, royalty-free license that includes full source code.

 

“Evaluating the ThreadX RTOS on XC5VFX30T Virtex-5 platforms provides users with a flexible environment to investigate the benefits of Express Logic’s multitasking solution,” said Jim Beneke, vice president of global technical marketing for Avnet Electronics Marketing.

 

"We are seeing strong interest in Xilinx's FPGA solutions for demanding real-time embedded applications," says William Lamie, Express Logic's president. "The addition of our ThreadX support for the PowerPC 440 hard processor core will most definitely help application developers leverage the Xilinx Virtex-5 and FPGAs to get better quality product to market in less time.”