A real time kernel for 16 bit PIC microcontrollers

A real time kernel or operating system is a system software for timely processing of the time critical events using multitasking i.e. scheduling and switching of CPU between several tasks developed as part of the application software. This paper presents a small and efficient multitasking kernel based on round robin scheduling in which each task is assigned a fixed amount of time for running. In addition to this, binary semaphores and event flags have been implemented for managing the system resources and signaling of events respectively. Kernel is written in assembly and is specifically designed for 16 bit PIC microcontrollers giving small code size, low over head and high CPU utilization.