AEMB on Altera with uC/OS-II in China

Seems like there are three important pieces of news to report: that the AEMB has made in-roads into China; that the AEMB has been implemented on Altera hardware; and that the AEMB is capable of booting uC/OS-II. According to the information provided at a Chinese media website, a key Chinese university (Shandong University of Science and Technology) has successfully implemented an SoC system using the AEMB on an Altera platform and boots uC/OS-II.

They published a paper on this earlier this year. The details are mostly in Chinese but some information can be gleaned from the diagrams and references. This is a verification paper on the capabilities of an AEMB SoC to boot uC/OS-II on an Altera platform. The SoC has a number of peripherals and uses a Wishbone bus.

MicroC/OS-II (commonly termed µC/OS-II or uC/OS-II), is a low-cost priority-based pre-emptive real time multitasking operating system kernel for microprocessors, written mainly in the C programming language. It is mainly intended for use in embedded systems.

The AEMB has previously been shown to boot Linux and now it is shown to boot uC/OS-II. There should be no reason why it cannot boot other operating systems as well. According to the paper, they had to put in some minor effort to port uC/OS-II to the AEMB. This is in line with other reports of easily booting Linux on it.

However, to my knowledge, the AEMB has never been shown to work on the Altera platform. While care has been taken during the design process to cater to all popular hardware platforms, by ensuring that the code can be understood and synthesised by each vendor’s tools, it has never been tested on working Altera hardware until now.

So, the things to learn from this paper:

1. AEMB has now found a home in a key Chinese university. They may be developing further applications on it.
2. AEMB platforms can run on a Altera hardware platform. This broadens the possible hardware implementations.
3. AEMB is capable of running uC/OS-II – a popular RTOS. This ensures that the AEMB is capable of real-time applications.