Will the new Bill Gates please stand up?

Circuit Cellar together with Texas Instruments have launched a design contest around the Stellaris LM3S9B96 microcontroller. This 100 pin controller is based on a 32-bit ARM Cortex–M3 core with 256 KB flash memory, 96 KB RAM and it sports many interesting features like CAN, USB 2.0 OTG/Host/Device, 10/100 Ethernet MAC and PHY, I2C, I2S, SSI, UART, PWM, ADC and some other peripherals. Although this is more or less what you would expect from a modern 32-bit microcontroller, it is not all: the device also has a built-in library with almost 400 functions to access its peripherals. This BIOS (Basic Input Output System) provides a nice hardware abstraction layer for almost all of the registers and makes life of the programmer much easier.

To top thing off, the device also has a built in real time operating system (RTOS)! According to the datasheet the controller has a copy of SafeRTOS inside, a secure version of FreeRTOS edited by Wittenstein. Unfortunately, the datasheet isn’t very verbose about it, but it is there.

Now what do you call a processor with peripherals, a BIOS and an operating system? A computer! Indeed, this microcontroller is pretty much like a computer on a chip (CoC) and the only thing missing is a graphical interface, but that is probably just a matter of time and/or pin count.

Are we entering a new era of microcontrollers? Will this be the new standard architecture for the next generation of microcontrollers? What about code portability? Will the user get access to the source code of the built-in BIOS and RTOS? Will ARM, TI & Wittenstein be the next Intel, AMD and Microsoft?

At the end of 2008 I assisted at an ARM conference in Paris. The buzz word then was "code portability". If only everybody would be using ARM-based processors, then code would be easily portable from one device to another. Luminary, the developper and former owner of the Stellaris processors, was present too. But is the BIOS & RTOS they now put in their devices good for code portability? Will other ARM-based microcontroller manufacturers too integrate a compatible BIOS & RTOS in their devices or provide compatible libraries? Or are we going to have to deal with tens of different BIOS-es and RTOS-es in the future, supported by code bloating tests to figure out what the heck the platform actually used is capable off?

Devices will get bigger and will integrate more and more. Within a couple of years they will be as powerfull as a modern PC is now, with built-in BIOS and OS. This all smells so much of Microsoft and the OS wars from the past years.

NOOOOOOOoooo!!!!!

Please, not again!