A Real-Time Microkernel for the dsPIC33E Family

A microkernel for the dsPIC33E microcontroller family is presented. This is useful because existing microkernels and real-time operating systems do not implement the real-time locking policy immediate ceiling priority protocol (ICPP) for this family, or if they do, their configuration is not straightforward (as far as we know). For complex embedded systems, it is advantageous to design the system using a concurrent process model. The simplest entity that can be used to achieve this is the microkernel. The most important result of this work is the development of a new microkernel (AμK) that implements a priority-based process scheduling along with an ICPP shared resource access policy. AμK is characterized by its easy configuration. Furthermore, among other good properties of AμK, it is possible to achieve a central processing unit (CPU) utilization of more than 99.9% for scheduling periods of 10 ms. Finally, two study cases with real-time constraints are shown.