ITRON Newsletter No.30 (HTML Edition)

ITRON-specification Product Registration Update

The product listed in the table was newly registered as an ITRON-specification product since the last issue of this Newsletter and before December 1, 1997. Since this product implements the µITRON3.0 specification, a comparison with the µITRON3.0 compatibility checksheets can be viewed at the ITRON Web site. The most up-to-date list of registered products is available from here.

ITRON-related Publications

Listed in the table are the publications prepared and issued by the ITRON Technical Committee as of December 1, 1997. They are available from the publishers indicated.

The revised edition of the µITRON3.0 Standard Handbook includes the latest version of the µITRON3.0 specification (Ver.3.02.02). Changes made between the µITRON3.0 Standard Handbook Ver.3.00.00 and Ver.3.02.00 are listed in the ITRON Standard Guidebook 2. The changes from Ver.3.02.00 to Ver.3.02.02 are limited to organizational changes and additional explanations; they do not affect the technical specifications themselves.

The ITRON-µITRON Standard Handbook is a one-volume compilation of µITRON2.0 and ITRON2 specifications. The ITRON Standard Guidebook 2 deals primarily with µITRON3.0. The earlier ITRON Standard Guidebook '92-'93 remains as a valuable reference for use with the µITRON (Ver.2.0) and ITRON2 specifications, even though the dates in its title are now past.

Report on MST'97 Exhibit and Special Seminar on Real-Time Systems

The TRON Association publicized the ITRON specifications at the Microcomputer System & Tool Fair (MST'97), from November 12 through 14 (Wed.-Fri.). In addition to the TRON booth, a special seminar on real-time systems was presented by the ITRON Technical Committee as part of the MST'97 Technical Seminars.

As its name indicates, the Microcomputer System & Tool Fair is a specialized trade fair focusing on embedded systems technologies and development support tools. It is put on each year by the Japan System House Association (JASA). The 1997 edition was held for the first time in Tokyo Big Sight (the Tokyo International Exhibition Center, Ariake), and was bigger in scale than previous events.

The TRON Association booth featured, in addition to the usual panels and literature, a personal computer area where visitors could browse the ITRON Web site. Questionnaires for the annual survey on ITRON-specification OS use trends were made available, and when possible, visitors were asked to fill out the questionnaire on the spot. A now familiar publicity tool is to ask supporting companies to display "We Support the ITRON-specification OS" placards in their booths; for this event we were able to place placards in a total of 41 booths (see the list). We wish to express our gratitude to all those vendors who cooperated in this way.

As a first-time venture for us, we put together a special seminar on real-time systems as one of the technical seminar programs held along with the fair. The aim of the seminar was to help embedded systems engineers gain more familiarity with the use of a real-time OS, and to promote the use of the ITRON-specification OS and real-time OSs in general. To these ends, we devised a program that would explain how a system is developed around a real-time OS, starting with the basics. We scheduled a beginning-level course on "Real-time system development methods," an intermediate-level course on "Debugging systems that use a RTOS," and a third course on advanced theory, "Introduction to hard real-time scheduling theory." These three seminar lectures continued from 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Friday, November 14.

For each seminar lecture the hall, with a capacity of 200 persons, was filled to overflowing, demonstrating once more the high degree of interest in this type of seminar. Given the success of this event, the ITRON Technical Committee is already thinking about continuing this practice in subsequent years.

Presentation at TRONSHOW'97

TRONSHOW'97, held for three days from December 3 through 5 in TEPIA Hall (located in Kita-Aoyama in Tokyo's Minato Ward), included presentations updating each of the TRON subprojects. The ITRON presentation was given on Wednesday, December 3 from 1:00 to 1:45 p.m. by Toshiba's Kiichiro Tamaru, ITRON Technical Committee chairman. He talked about how and to what extent the ITRON-specification OS is being used today, then described some recent activities of the Committee. Around 100 persons attended the presentation.

New Products

Products recently registered with the TRON Association are introduced here.

FS.ExRon-ARM: a real-time OS for the ARM7TDMI Series
ARM Model/THUMB Model

FIRMWARE SYSTEMS INC.

FS.ExRon-ARM is a mITRON3.0-specification real-time, multitasking OS for use with the ARM7TDMI Series of 32-bit RISC microprocessors.

The product lineup ranges from a minimum configuration model supporting only basic system calls, to a maximum configuration model supporting approximately 100 system calls. The vendor can suggest the right model for a PDA or any other application system.

The user can choose a custom implementation with only the system calls required for the particular system, or can perform the customization to the target system at the kernel generation stage. Support for other chips is being considered as well.

Features

• Kernel models

  The kernel is available in two models, an ARM Model taking advantage of the ARM architecture, and a THUMB Model based on the THUMB architecture. Users may choose the model suited for their system.

• Task coding

  Tasks and interrupt handlers may be written in ARM mode (32-bit instruction length) or THUMB mode (16-bit instructions); or, mixed use of both modes is possible.

• Support tools

  An initializer is available for easy definition of tasks, semaphores and other resource information. Firmware Systems, as a tool vendor, supports this OS with a cross-C compiler, debugger and other tools, and is planning additional development support tools for multitasking systems, such as a remote debugger and task tracer.

For more information, contact:

Firmware Systems Inc.
Uchihonmachi 55 Building, 1-3-10 Uchihonmachi,
Chuo-ku, Osaka 540 Japan
Tel.: 06-944-0317

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This newsletter is a special edition for WWW of the one appeared in TRONWARE vol.49 and TRON PROJECT JOURNAL No.49.

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