Express Logic Brings ThreadX RTOS to Renesas Electronics RX Family of 32-bit Microcontrollers

”Renesas Electronics America is pleased that Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS support of the RX600 MCUs is going live,” said Peter Carbone, senior director, Consumer & Industrial Business Unit, Renesas Electronics America. “Having Express Logic as a partner company continues to broaden our RX ecosystem, providing customers support and resources from the highest quality vendors. Embedded real-time control and communications designs demand the kind of performance, efficiency, and reliability that Express Logic’s RTOS and stacks bring to the table.”

Renesas Electronics' RX600 series MCUs combine the revolutionary new 32-bit RX CPU core with the industry’s fastest embedded flash memory to deliver 1.65 DMIPS per MHz all the way up to 100 MHz. These MCUs include hardware support for digital signal processing and floating point operations, which are needed to address real-time motor and motion control, audio and image processing, and sensor data processing—common requirements in industrial, healthcare, metering, and building automation applications. This CPU core performance, coupled with high-speed connectivity, mixed-signal analog capabilities, compact code size, and extremely low power consumption make RX600 a natural choice for embedded control tasks. RX600 MCUs offer a wide range of on-chip memory sizes up to 2MB of Flash and 128KB of SRAM in a broad selection of packages as small as 7x7 mm and range up to 176 pins in over 200 products.
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“We are pleased to extend ThreadX RTOS support for Renesas Electronics’ family of RX microcontrollers,” commented William E. Lamie, CEO of Express Logic. “The integration with ThreadX and our supporting products indicates Express Logic’s commitment to the RX600 devices and gives developers the opportunity to use this powerful combination in their new designs.”

Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS offers a robust library of application-callable operating system services that simplify and optimize the performance of an embedded system. ThreadX is designed for microcontroller-based applications and features a memory footprint as small as 2KB, so it can reside in even the most limited on-chip MCU memory. ThreadX provides preemptive, real-time, priority-based scheduling for optimum responsiveness and high performance and includes services such as thread scheduling, message passing, resource allocation, synchronization, and interrupt management. ThreadX also incorporates Preemption-Threshold™ technology that can be used to minimize context switches, while still maintaining system schedulability.

ThreadX is complemented by FileX, a full embedded file system, NetX, a rich but small-footprint IPv4/IPv6 TCP/IP stack, USBX, a full USB Host/Device stack, and PrismX, a graphics development toolkit. TraceX, Express Logic’s graphical real-time event analysis development tool, also is available for the RX600 MCUs. ThreadX is provided with full source code and is fully integrated into the IAR Embedded Workbench and Renesas Electronics HEW IDEs. A free evaluation version of ThreadX and a demonstration program in source code form are available for the RX600 MCUs from Express Logic.