Avix Adds Support For Energy Micro’s Low Power EFM32 Gecko Microcontrollers

Many RTOS vendors have been bringing out Cortex-M3 ports, without fully utilizing the power saving facilities offered by modern, low energy architectures such as the Energy Micro EFM32 devices. We see increasing customer demand for feature rich RTOS support, which don't compromise on energy efficiency. EFM32's low energy mode features complement the AVIX RTOS very well, and provide a great solution for tackling energy sensitive applications, says Stig A. Olsen, Software Manager, Energy Micro.
Besides integrated power management, the AVIX RTOS offers features not found in any competing product, the most distinguishing being ‘True Zero Latency’. AVIX allows extremely high interrupt rates with latency equal to that of the underlying hardware because it never disables interrupts. As such, AVIX is a perfect match for the advanced interrupt architecture offered by the advanced Cortex™-M3 architecture implemented by the EFM®32 microcontroller (MCU) family. The ‘True Zero Latency’ feature does not come with any limitation and AVIX based interrupt handlers are allowed to make many system calls leading to interrupt handlers being fully integrated in the application. Offering zero latency combined with full interrupt handler-application integration is unique in the market and distinguishes AVIX from competing products, a distinction emphasized by adding ‘True’ to ‘Zero Latency’.

AVIX offers low RAM consumption by using the dedicated EFM32 Gecko interrupt stack pointer for interrupt handling, leading to a reduction of the stack size of every thread in the application.

For testing, AVIX comes with the unique ‘Thread Activation Tracing’, allowing real time monitoring of thread activity. Combined with Kernel Aware Debugging plug-ins, this offers advanced testing capabilities.

A free evaluation version containing demo code for the EFM32 Gecko based Starter Kit is available from AVIX RT’s website, www.avix-rt.com. This demo code demonstrates the low power modes of the EFM32 Gecko and how these low power modes are controlled by AVIX using its integrated power management. Additionally this evaluation version contains a number of tutorials demonstrating the many features offered by AVIX. All demo’s are documented in a ‘getting started’ document which forms part of the download.