Application for HCS12

[Joel Sherrill <joel@OARcorp.com>]

Sorry for not getting to you personally.  I have been on a tight
deadline just before a holiday.


HDL-MikeFriedrichs wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have been tasked with finding a RTOS for a Motorola HCS12, 16 bit 
> micro-controller.
> 
> Is the RTEMS a good fit for this device, or I am I expecting too much 
> from this 16 bit micro-controller?

I don't think you are expecting too much.  Given a good gcc port and
a simulator, a port can be done fairly painlessly.  Most of the effort
is in .h code describing the processor -- stack grows up/down, has an
FPU, etc.  The only assembler code is usually the context switch and
interrupt processing.  And on some CPUs, this has even been done in
C.  The SuperH (SH) and TI C3x/C4x DSPs do the interrupt dispatching in
C.  The core of the MIPS interrupt vector selection is CPU model
dependent and usually in C.

> This device has 16 bit registers, 64 Mbyte of flash, 4Kbytes of ram, and 
> paged memory expansion, running a 24Mhz bus.

The 16 bit part is not a problem.  There is a port to the Reneas
(Hitachi) H8 series.

RTEMS uses a stack per task and some memory itself for housekeeping.
4K of RAM is light.  RAM usage is proportional to the number of RTEMS
objects created.  Flash usage is going to be proportional to the
number of services used.  Each port selects the minimal stack size.

You can run every non-networked RTEMS test in less than 256K of code
space.  Offhand, I would guess that the worst RAM usage in a test
is one of the timing tests which creates 100 tasks.

With external RAM, there should not be a problem.

--joel

> Thanks,
> MikeF
> 
> 


-- 
Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.             Director of Research & Development
joel at OARcorp.com                 On-Line Applications Research
Ask me about RTEMS: a free RTOS  Huntsville AL 35805
    Support Available             (256) 722-9985