Express Logic's popular ThreadX RTOS supports all of Tensilica’s Diamond Standard and Xtensa configurable processor cores. The combination of ThreadX and Tensilica’s Xtensa is already production-proven in a high-volume SOC design used in personal laser printers.

ThreadX is a small-footprint RTOS with real-time determinism that enables Tensilica customers to support applications that demand high-performance, low overhead, and fast time-to-market. As a full port to all of the Tensilica products, ThreadX supports Tensilica’s onchip coprocessors including its floating point unit, Vectra DSP engine and special Tensilica Instruction Extension (TIE) cases. The simplicity and low cost of ThreadX, including its royalty-free licensing, make it attractive for high-volume applications in consumer devices, office automation, medical equipment and networking. ThreadX has been widely embraced and is currently deployed in over 300 million electronic products.

Small Footprint

ThreadX is implemented as a C library. Only the features used by the application are brought into the final image. The minimal footprint of ThreadX is as small as 2.5KB on CISC processors.

Fast Response

ThreadX helps your application respond to external events faster than ever before. ThreadX is also deterministic. A high priority thread starts responding to an external event on the order of the time it takes to perform a highly optimized ThreadX context switch.

Easy To Use

ThreadX is very easy to use. The ThreadX API is both intuitive and highly functional. In addition, the API names are made of real words and not the “alphabet soup” names that are common to other RTOS products. Building a ThreadX application is also easy. Simply include the TX_API.H file in the application software and link the application objects with the ThreadX library. The resulting image is ready for execution – it’s that simple!

No Mysteries

ThreadX is delivered with complete C and assembly source code so you can see exactly how ThreadX operates. If you are used to in-house kernels or had bad experiences with “black box” commercial RTOS products, this should be most comforting.

Advanced Features

ThreadX provides an advanced set of services, including:

• Threads
• Application Timers
• Message Queues
• Counting Semaphores
• Mutexes
• Event Flags
• Block Memory Pools
• Byte Memory Pools

Preemption-Threshold ™

ThreadX’s preemption-threshold technology is a unique addition to the priority based, preemptive scheduling algorithm. Preemption-threshold allows the application to disable preemption over ranges of priorities instead of disabling preemption of the entire system. Applications can take advantage of ThreadX's preemption-threshold to eliminate excessive context switching , un-deterministic priority inversion, and enhance responsiveness.

Priority Inheritance

Another tool for battling un-deterministic priority inversion is the priority inheritance feature found in the ThreadX Mutex object.

Flexible Memory Utilization

ThreadX control blocks and memory areas associated with thread stacks, message queues, and memory pools can be easily located (during run-time) in any address space on your hardware. For example, ThreadX makes it easy to boost the performance of a high-priority thread by placing its stack in a fast memory area.

Dynamic Creation

ThreadX allows you to create system resources dynamically. There are no predetermined limits on the number of ThreadX resources you can use. Furthermore, the number of system objects does not have any impact on performance.

Fast Timer Management

ThreadX application timers are available in one-shot or periodic operation. ThreadX manages activation and expiration without linear searching. This greatly reduces the amount of overhead in timer-centric applications like communications and process control.

Extra Applications Programs

Besides offering the ThreadX operating system, Express Logic offers several applications programs for Xtensa and Diamond Standard processors, including FileX, NetX, PEGX, and USBX.

FileX is Express Logic's high-performance MS-DOS compatible file system. It is fully integrated with ThreadX and is available for all supported processors. Like ThreadX, FileX is designed to have a small footprint and high-performance, making it ideal for today's deeply embedded applications that require file operations.

NetX is Express Logic's high-performance implementation of TCP/IP protocol standards. It is fully integrated with ThreadX and is available for all supported processors. NetX has a unique Piconet™ architecture. Combined with a zero-copy API, it makes it a perfect fit for today's deeply embedded applications that require network connectivity.

The PEGX (Portable Embedded GUI for ThreadX) development package is a professional quality graphical user interface package created to meet the needs of embedded systems developers. PEGX is small, fast, and easily ported to virtually any hardware configuration capable of supporting graphical output. PEGX also delivers exceptional visual appeal and an intuitive and powerful API for application-level user interface development.

Express Logic offers complete support for Xtensa and Diamond Standard processors for their USBX high-performance implementation of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) protocol. USBX achieves its performance advantages through an efficient design that minimized function calls within the API.

See Express Logic's page on the FileX support for Tensilica's processors.

See Express Logic's page on the NetX support for Tensilica's processors.

See Express Logic's page on the PEGX support for Tensilica's processors.

See Express Logic's page on the USBX support for Tensilica's products.