Free Whitepaper: Real-Time Virtualization™ for Connected Devices

Learn how VirtualLogix™ real-time virtualization™ software enables multiple OSes to run simultaneously on the same processor while satisfying hard real-time requirements. By sharing hardware resources & combining an RTOS with a rich OS such as Linux, designers can add more functionality while lowering BoM.

It's a real, shipping product - Luminary Micro is the first licensee out of the gate, with an evaluation kit, and even a $10,000 design contest. The Austin company hopes to make assembly programming obsolete, freeing developers to write in C, be more productive, and migrate up to a "modern" 32-bit architecture. STMicroelectronics has also jumped on the Cortext-M3 bandwagon, here. (For details, don't miss ARM's new Cortex-M3 white paper).

Other ARM licensees like Atmel, however, are skeptical of complete code compatibility across ARM architectures (due to peripheral and pin count issues), and emphasize that in many cases designers must optimize critical code in assembly rather than C. "It's a lot easier to talk about design portability between MCU architectures than it is to actually realize it," quipped Jacko Wilbrink, Atmel manager ARM products. Atmel, for example, has invested heavily in the ARM7 and ARM9 architectures to make them viable for embedded applications that used to be microcontroller-only. They emphasize peripheral compatibility across Atmel's ARM products as well as even with its AVR32 architectures. In addition, they have the venerable AVR in the 8-bit space. Indeed, the company emphasis at Atmel is as much on actual, shipping products in each line as it is on the "philosophy" of why one should migrate up to 32-bit in the first place.

In this space, most of the action is in software. VirtualLogix (formerly Jaluna), for example, offers VLX a high-performance solution providing concurrent support for rich operating systems (OS) like Linux, and in-house or commercial Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) on general purpose processors and DSPs. TRANGO Systems offers Hypervisor for ARM and MIPS, allowing you to run securely multiple native Execution Environments on single core and multi-core platforms.

MIPS has a great virtualization hook with their MTASE for (Multi-Threading Extensions to MIPS® Architecture). But, in the networking and industrial spaces, Intel gave virtualization a huge boost recently by announcing "Intel® Virtualization Technology" available in the Intel Core 2 Duo. Check out the white paper here.

Especially vendors that focus on bringing Microsoft Windows XP to 'embedded' or 'real-time' environments are eager to exploit virtualization. Tenasys, for instance, offers Real-Time Hypervisor, which plans to leverage Intel's virtualization technology to allow for combination hard RTOS plus Windows XP applications. Competitor Ardence offers RTX, also taking advantage of Intel virtualization technology to allow for combination hard RTOS plus Windows XP applications. Read the interesting news release from Ardence on virtualization in the enterprise space and their 'Device Edition' product, here, and the check out the 'embedded version' of 'Device Edition,' here.