The ability to store and manage large amounts of data has become a critical requirement for automotive infotainment systems, medical devices, industrial controllers, portable media players and a variety of other embedded systems.

Microchip Technology Inc. announced the result of its strategic partnership with Google PowerMeter—the first Reference Implementation of the Google PowerMeter API for embedded developers. Designers now have a quick and easy way to enter the global energy-conservation market, by creating products for the measurement and monitoring of energy usage with Microchip’s Google PowerMeter Reference Implementation and its broad portfolio of 16- and 32-bit PIC microcontrollers, energy-measurement ICs, Ethernet controllers, and radios for ZigBee and embedded Wi-Fi wireless networking.

Traditionally, realtime operating systems (RTOSs) have used priority-based preemptive scheduling to determine which software task gets control of the CPU. While this approach helps ensure that higher-priority tasks always execute in preference to lower-priority tasks, it can lead to a condition known as task starvation.