eCosCentric contributes generic I²C™ bus infrastructure from eCosPro^®

CAMBRIDGE, UK -- April 20, 2005 -- eCosCentric Limited, the eCos and RedBoot experts, today announced the contribution of the generic I²C™ bus infrastructure from their eCosPro^® product line for inclusion within the public eCos project.

Support for the I²C bus (also commonly referred to as the "two-wire interface" or TWI) was created as part of eCosCentric's ongoing development programme, and is incorporated into custom and off-the-shelf eCosPro Developer's Kits. The I²C package includes an abstraction layer to enable eCos application developers to make use of devices attached to the bus, without needing to concern themselves with the implementation details of the bus. Typical devices attached via the I²C bus include real-time clocks, serial EEPROMS, smart-cards and infrared controllers.

The package incorporates support for both generic "bit-banging" I²C drivers and dedicated I²C hardware drivers. The generic implementation supplies all of the timing and protocol handling for bit-banging mode, and requires a minimal amount of platform-specific code to be written for GPIO line manipulation. In contrast, dedicated hardware drivers can be more complex to write, but benefit from reduced processor loading through their use of interrupt driven I/O and DMA modes.

"eCosCentric plays the leading commercial role in the broader eCos community and this contribution again helps to focus developer effort with a uniform Application Programming Interface for I²C integration in eCos-based designs", said Alex Schuilenburg, Managing Director at eCosCentric. The richness of features and the scalable nature of eCos continues to drive its growth as the leading royalty-free real-time operating system for deployment in resource constrained embedded devices.

The contribution includes detailed documentation to accompany the source code, specifying how I²C device drivers should be written, and is packaged using the Component Description Language that enables the unique level of fine grained configurability found in eCos.

About eCosPro

eCosPro is a stable, fully tested and supported version of the eCos open source real-time operating system and RedBoot bootstrap firmware. The eCosPro Developer's Kit is a distribution of eCosPro which includes prebuilt eCos host tools and compiler toolchains, full documentation, an Eclipse-based integrated development environment to streamline eCos application development and a libstdc++ implementation for selected architectures.

About eCosCentric

Founded in April 2002, eCosCentric is the leading provider of eCos and RedBoot support, training, development and consulting services worldwide. Staffed by the original eCos creators and highly experienced embedded system and software engineers, eCosCentric provides complete solutions consisting of run-time systems, complementary host tools and certified third party applications.

I²C is a trademark of Philips Semiconductors Corporation.

For further details visit http://www.ecoscentric.com/ecospro.shtml or contact info@ecoscentric.com for pricing and availability.