Enea's OSEck DSP RTOS Available for StarCore SC1000 and SC2000 DSP Cores

– Enea (Stockholm: ENEA.ST), the world leader in advanced device software, today announced the availability of its OSEck real-time operating system (RTOS) for the StarCore SC1000 and SC2000 families of digital signal processor cores. OSEck provides full support for the StarCore’s high-speed control, signal processing, and media processing capabilities. OSEck also provides high-performance message-based LINX interprocess communications (IPC) services, which simplify the design of complex mobile infrastructure applications spanning multiple StarCore DSP cores.

“The SC1000 and SC2000 core families combine excellent multimedia performance with an efficient VLES instruction set that reduces code size and power consumption,” said Nicklas Gustafson, director of product management at Enea. “And unlike many DSPs, StarCore DSPs also deliver excellent performance in the control plane. “OSEck provides full support for StarCore’s high-speed control and media processing facilities, providing an ideal platform for developing and deploying SC1000- and SC2000-based mobile multimedia applications.”

The SC1000 and SC2000 core families provide a compact, low-power control and signal processing solution that is optimized for mobile multimedia applications. Both core families feature a VLES (variable length execution set) instruction set that enables it to provide exceptional performance for both control and signal processing applications at a reduced power level. The SC2000 also features new SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) multimedia instructions that substantially boost video processing performance. For example, the SC2000 core can encode and decode VGA-quality MPEG-4 video at 30 frames per second.

“OSEck’s compact footprint and hard real-time response make it an excellent fit for the StarCore architecture,” said StarCore spokesperson Eyal Rosin, senior director for DSP cores. “We think network equipment providers who require high-speed control and media processing will find StarCore DSPs running OSEck to be an attractive platform for developing and deploying a wide range of mobile multimedia applications.”
 
OSEck (OSE Compact Kernel) is a DSP-optimized version of the full-featured OSE RTOS. Occupying less than 10 kbytes of memory (in a minimal configuration), OSEck delivers fully-preemptive, event-driven real-time response with a context switching speed of 300 nsec and a worst-case interrupt latency of 500 nsec.

OSEck also provides built-in error detection and handling, and features high-performance message-based LINX interprocess communications (IPC) services, which greatly simplify the design of complex wireless applications spanning multiple StarCore processors.

OSEck provides an ideal run-time platform for standalone SC1000 and SC2000 systems. But it is also an integral part of Enea’s Network Application Services Platform (NASP), a telecom-in-a-box solution for developing and deploying distributed telecom applications spanning multiple processors (i.e., SC2000, 32-/64-bit CPUs, other DSPs), operating systems (i.e., OSEck, Linux, other RTOSes) and interconnects (i.e., Gigabit Ethernet, PCI, RapidIO). The NASP platform combines Enea’s OSEck and OSE RTOSes (Enea’s full-featured RTOS for 32-/64-bit CPUs), with Carrier Grade Linux, high-availability middleware (Element), a fault-tolerant database (Polyhedra), and Eclipse-based development tools.

Development support for OSEck/StarCore platforms includes an RTOS-aware source-level debugger, which supports freeze-mode debug and post-mortem analysis. OSEck also features a high-level run-mode analysis tool that enables StarCore designers to study system details such as OSEck process/task information, CPU and memory profiling, task switching, stack and memory usage.

Pricing for a single-seat SC1000 or SC2000 OSEck developers license starts at $8000.

About Enea
Enea is the leading supplier of real-time operating systems, middleware, development tools, database technology and professional services for high-availability systems such as telecommunications infrastructure, mobile devices, medical instrumentation, and automobile control/infotainment. Enea’s flagship operating system, OSE is deployed in approximately half of the world’s 3G mobile phones and base stations. Enea has over 500 employees and is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange.