Embedded application design using a real-time OS

Commercial suppliers of products for the embedded space have received a lot of investor and press attention. The reason is simple: embedded devices, including those that will interact with and support the Internet, will continue to grow in number and function as the unstoppable trend to higher integration and lower prices makes the use of embedded processors routine. Supporting this trend is a large, fragmented collection of tool suppliers for embedded developers. Among this collection are those supplying real-time operating systems. While the basic characteristics of RTOSs are common, there are a lot of differences as well, and these are tracked and catalogued by a number of trade magazines and services. An embedded developer faces the task of not only deciding what commercial RTOS and other tools to use, but of learning a programming environment that might be completely foreign. He must deal with resource constraints, hardware device drivers, interrupt routines, memory allocation and a host of other issues that as a systems developer, he probably never had to face.