The PURE family of object-oriented operating systems for deeply embedded systems

Deeply embedded systems are forced to operate under extreme resource constraints in terms of memory, CPU, time and power consumption. Automotive systems are a typical example: today's limousines can be considered as (large-scale) distributed systems on wheels. There are cars in daily operation consisting of over 60 networked processors (i.e. microcontrollers). Conservative estimations suggest that, in the near future, every car will be equipped with about 20 networked microcontrollers, on average. The complexity of these "decentralized computer architectures" can no longer be managed by the application alone. Dedicated embedded operating systems are required to ensure the manageability, adaptability, portability and efficiency of the software. Resource-sparing operations under (hard) real-time constraints must be the maxim. This paper discusses the design and implementation of PURE (Portable Universal Runtime Executive) for these classes of deeply embedded systems.