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A partnership between Clarinox Technologies and PX5 will simplify and strengthen wireless connectivity capabilities for embedded devices. The companies will integrate Clarinox’s software with PX5’s new real-time operating system (RTOS) to increase visibility, shrink debugging time and shorten project length, leaders of the two companies told EE Times.
Clarinox Technologies, which makes short-range connectivity software, and PX5, which produces runtime solutions for deeply embedded applications, announced their partnership earlier this year, integrating ClarinoxBlue and ClarinoxWiFi protocol stack software with the new PX5 RTOS.
“Simplifying embedded development is part of the character of both PX5 and Clarinox,” Clarinox CEO Trish Messiter told EE Times. “We work together to create a solution that will help our joint customers.”
The two companies expect applications in video processing, communications, consumer electronics and other small devices, said William E. Lamie, president of PX5.
Increasing visibility and shrinking debugging time are closely aligned here. The end result: no more black boxes.
“Typically, there is no visibility; it’s like trying to find a black cat in a dark room,” Clarinox’s Messiter said, referring to other similar technology. “Clarinox software has enhanced debug tools. This is really significant. The debugging of embedded software is incredibly difficult. Clarinox is focused on creating more visibility so you get insights into system behavior. This is designed by engineers to be useful for engineers developing embedded devices.”
“We offer a complete, full code distribution,” PX5’s Lamie said. “When a customer buys a PX5 RTOS license, they can see everything the RTOS is doing. In my opinion, you can’t be in the RTOS business with a black box.”
When developing a new product or software, visibility into the embedded software can make the difference between a project that is canceled or launched. Clarinox’s ClariFi debugging tool includes automated testing, which enables customers to thoroughly test the system, Messiter said.
“In some cases, projects don’t finish because developers can’t find what’s wrong,” she said. “That’s the worst-case scenario and the project gets canceled, or a bug may take months to debug. But with the right visibility, scripting and other tools that are part of ClariFi, you might be able to fix a bug in days or weeks, compared with months—it’s a huge savings. One of our customers estimated around 70% savings in debug time.”
This partnership “heralds a new age of robust, high-performance embedded devices that helps engineers to meet the market need for increased reliability,” the companies said in prepared remarks.
The main goals of the collaboration are to streamline product development, help embedded developers launch new developments and assist embedded developers in modernizing legacy devices, according to Messiter.
“With embedded engineering workloads at unprecedented levels, our integration with PX5 ensures that engineers have a foundation that is stable and efficient,” she said.
The industrial-grade PX5 RTOS is an advanced, fifth-generation RTOS designed for the most demanding embedded applications with best-of-class size, performance, safety and security, according to the companies.
Compared with the widely used embedded Linux, with response times of hundreds of microseconds to a millisecond, the PX5 RTOS offers response times of microseconds and even sub-microseconds, Lamie said. Another key difference, he added, is the abstraction layer/API.
Compared with other traditional RTOS in the industry, the PX5 RTOS provides a native implementation of the POSIX threads (Pthreads) APIs that is RTOS-fast and safety-certifiable.
“We’ve built a better mousetrap underneath—it’s easier with an industry-standard API, and it’s smaller, faster and safer,” Lamie said.
The PX5 RTOS is built on a native implementation of the industry-standard Pthreads API—including semaphore, mutex and message queues—and offers real-time extensions, such as event flags, fast queues, tick timers and memory management, the two companies said.
This industry-standard support instantly enables a wide range of software stacks—both open-source and commercial—for real-time embedded IoT platforms, reducing time to market, improving device firmware quality and enhancing portability across platforms. These benefits help device makers maximize their investments in firmware development, according to the companies’ prepared remarks.
As for project length, Clarinox worked with a European videoconferencing company on a project where the industry average is about 13 months, Messiter said. “Their project took eight months, and they were significantly happy with that savings in time to market,” she added.
Another key feature of the collaboration is the ability to offer the same chipsets to integrate with Wi-Fi and all types of Bluetooth.
“Traditionally, companies often have acquired software for Bluetooth separate from software for Wi-Fi,” Messiter said. “Sometimes they used two separate chipsets to handle that. That’s not always easy for the embedded developers or convenient for the product cost and footprint. With the Clarinox solution, Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy and Wi-Fi can be obtained from a single source and run on a single combo chipset. This is practical for both new developments and for retrofitting Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth into legacy devices. Customers come to us saying what they want, and we tailor the software package to their requirements. Due to our abstraction layer approach, this software enables them to reuse software should they change their target platform in the future, thereby reducing project timelines.”
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