Enea announces OSEck DSP RTOS for the LSI ZSP500 signal processor

OSEck/ZSP500 Tandem Provides High-Performance, Low-Cost, Low-Power Solution for Wireless Terminal Market

San Jose, CA, June 12, 2006 – Enea, the world leader in advanced device software, today announced the availability of its OSEck real-time operating system (RTOS) for the LSI Logic ZSP500 digital signal processor. Together, the ZSP500 and OSEck provide an excellent platform for deploying broadband mobile applications requiring high-performance packet and media processing. Enea expects particularly strong demand for the high-performance, low-power, low-cost platform in the emerging Asian 2G/3G wireless terminal market.

“The ZSP G2 architecture provides a powerful platform for deploying wireless terminal applications, especially those requiring high-speed media processing,” said Nicklas Gustafson, director of product management at Enea. “ZSP500 embedded DSP cores equipped with the OSEck RTOS are ideal for deploying 2G/3G wireless terminal and infrastructure applications, particularly those requiring voice and multimedia processing.”

The ZSP500 is a high-performance, superscalar DSP. Available in synthesizable RTL and hard macro versions, the ZSP500 combines a four-issue, eight-stage pipeline with two 16 x 16 MAC (multiply-accumulate) units and two ALUs (arithmetic logic units). The ZSP500 can execute up to four instructions per cycle, giving it a peak performance of 800 MIPS (or 400 MMACs per second) at 200 MHz. 
For applications requiring higher performance, the ZSP500 also supports the LSI Z.TurboTM accelerator, which enables OEMs to add specialized instructions, coprocessors, and other hardware acceleration capabilities to the ZSP500 core. Other key features include advanced power management (automatic and software programmable), a JTAG debug interface, and optional real-time trace support.

OSEck (OSE Compact Kernel) is a DSP-optimized version of the full-featured OSE RTOS. Occupying less than 4 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 1 usec. OSEck also features high-performance message-based LINX interprocess communications (IPC) services, which greatly simplify the design, deployment and management of complex wireless applications spanning multiple ZSP500 processors.

“OSEck’s small footprint and hard real-time response make it an excellent platform for hosting media-rich ZSP500-based mobile applications,” said Peter Gasperini, senior marketing manager, DSP Products Division, LSI Logic. “We expect the ZSP500/OSEck tandem to be very attractive to equipment providers who require a reliable, high-performance, compact, low-cost signal processing platform.”

Development support for the OSEck/ZSP500 platform includes an RTOS-aware source-level debugger, which supports real-time trace, run-mode and freeze-mode debugging, as well as post-mortem analysis. OSEck also features a high-level analysis tool that enables ZSP500 designers to study system details such as OSEck process/task information, CPU/memory profiling, task switching, stack and memory usage. 

OSEck is 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., ZSP500, 32-/64-bit CPUs, etc), operating systems (i.e., OSEck, Linux, other RTOSes) and interconnects (i.e., Gigabit Ethernet, PCI, and 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.

A single-seat developer’s license for OSEck running on ZSP500 cores starts at $8,000.

About Enea 

Enea (Stockholm: ENEA.ST) is the leading supplier of real-time operating systems, middleware, development tools, database technology and professional services for high-availability distributed multiprocessing applications 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.