IAR Systems Offers Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS with IAR Embedded Workbench IDE

IAR Embedded Workbench is in use by over 14,000 companies worldwide, and Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS is deployed in more than 1 billion electronic products, in consumer electronics, medical devices, and industrial control systems.

Developers of 32-bit embedded systems generally use an RTOS to manage the real-time scheduling of multithreaded applications and an integrated development environment to build applications from source code into firmware. The more integrated the combined tools, the easier the development solution. IAR Systems and Express Logic have, therefore, combined IAR Embedded Workbench and ThreadX, each widely used and highly regarded, to provide a much more powerful, affordable, fully integrated tool, which developers can purchase from IAR Systems.

The Products

Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS is a priority-based, preemptive scheduling RTOS for embedded applications. ThreadX is small in size, fast in real-time performance, and 100% royalty-free, making it ideal for applications in SoC development and end products. ThreadX is widely used in a variety of electronic products from highly regarded manufacturers, such as Apple, Sony, Broadcom, Welch-Allyn, and GE.

“We are excited to partner with IAR Systems in offering developers a fully integrated, powerful, best-in-class solution for embedded systems development,” commented William E. Lamie, President of Express Logic, Inc. “With IAR Embedded Workbench and our ThreadX RTOS, developers will achieve faster time-to-market and more successful products, enabling them to succeed more effectively in today’s highly competitive marketplace.”

IAR Embedded Workbench is a high-performance C/C++ compiler and debugger tool suite for applications based on 8-, 16-, and 32-bit microcontrollers. IAR Embedded Workbench features comprehensive and capable tools that allow developers to build new competitive products.

“IAR Systems is pleased to offer developers a complete solution, combining these powerful tools in a tightly integrated, easy-to-use form,” said Stefan Skarin, CEO of IAR Systems, AB. “ThreadX is a very popular RTOS among our many customers, and we are excited now to be able to offer it as part of a highly integrated, IAR-supported solution that will benefit embedded developers.”

Integrated Features

The IAR Embedded Workbench and ThreadX RTOS integration provides an unprecedented level of intuitiveness and efficiency. Embedded development will become easier and faster, resulting in shorter time to market and better-performing, end-user products.
Express Logic and IAR Systems offer these integrated features:

• ThreadX C/C++ and Assembly source code is 100% IAR compiler/assembler-compatible;
• ThreadX source code and libraries are structured as IAR Embedded Workbench projects, enabling immediate project building and debugging;
• The IAR C-SPY® Debugger includes ThreadX RTOS Awareness, providing insight into application threads, message queues, semaphores, mutexes, and other kernel objects;
• ThreadX RTOS Awareness shows thread-level execution profiling, giving developers critical information about CPU timing;
• Automatic RTOS and application event-trace displays can be selected from the IAR C-SPY Debugger with just a single click;
• IAR Embedded Workbench supports project configurations to control compiler optimizations for size and speed, and ThreadX build options for debug, trace, and execution profiling, enabling various application and RTOS builds to support different development activities.

ThreadX for IAR Embedded Workbench can be downloaded for a free trial from IAR Systems’ web site at: www.iar.com/ThreadX. The free trial is available for a variety of 32-bit processor architectures and includes a pre-built ThreadX library and full source code for a demo application that can be modified to form real applications.