Avnet XC5VFX30T board and Xilinx Virtex-5 Embedded kit (ML507 board) Run ThreadX RTOS

Express Logic, Inc., the worldwide leader in royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS), and Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:AVT), today announced ThreadX® RTOS now supports the PowerPC™ 440 processor embedded in Xilinx Virtex-5™ FPGAs. The IBM PowerPC 440 core is a hard 32-bit RISC CPU processor immersed directly into the Xilinx Virtex FPGA fabric to implement high-performance embedded applications. The combination of the hard PowerPC 440 processor with coprocessing capability and high-performance Virtex-5 FPGA fabric enables a wide range of performance optimization options.

ThreadX support for the PowerPC440 processor on Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs was jointly developed with Avnet Electronics Marketing, resulting in its availability for the Avnet Virtex-5 FX30T Evaluation Kit as well as the Xilinx Virtex-5 FX70T Embedded Kit (ML507 board). Express Logic, a member of the Xilinx AllianceEmbedded Program, first announced ThreadX support for the Xilinx MicroBlaze™ soft processor core and PowerPC 405 in 2003. Developers can now use ThreadX on either MicroBlaze, PowerPC405 or PowerPC440 architectures, allowing them to optimize their processor choice based on their ThreadX-supported application requirements.

Express Logic's ThreadX RTOS provides real-time embedded developers who use Xilinx FPGA solutions with the most technically advanced multitasking solution on the market today. Express Logic's picokernel™ design results in very high-performance and extremely small memory requirements — as small as 3Kbytes to meet extreme size constraints. ThreadX also provides applications using Xilinx’s PowerPC embedded processor cores with significant technical innovations, including extremely fast software timers and a mechanism to help reduce context switching called preemption-threshold™. ThreadX is the smallest, fastest, lowest cost commercial RTOS addressing deeply embedded applications in consumer electronics, medical devices, automotive electronics, and industrial control. ThreadX is royalty-free, making it ideal for high-volume products where manufacturing cost must be held to an absolute minimum.

The full suite of Express Logic offerings can now be used by Virtex-5 embedded PowerPC 440 users, including the NetX Duo™ IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack TCP/IP network stack, FileX® file management system, and PegX™ graphics development toolkit.