Real-time operating system (RTOS) for small (16-bit) microcontroller

Real-time operating system (RTOS) is gaining increasing use not only in 32-bit systems but also in 16-bit systems. RTOS is different from generic OS by several unique characteristics and the use of RTOS in embedded system development proves to be more advantageous. In this paper, 9 RTOSes targeting smaller processors have been evaluated and four of the RTOSes have been selected for performance benchmarking on the same M16/62P microcontroller platform to avoid bias. Based on the comparison, the μTKernel RTOS is chosen for porting to the H8S/2377 16-bit microcontroller to demonstrate the ease of RTOS platform migration. The same version of μTKernel RTOS running on different platforms are then compared. Lastly, an application is developed with the RTOS to demonstrate the ease of multi-task application development on such microcontroller platform.