High-end concepts typically aren't applied to an 8-bit MCU. But don't rule them out just yet.

Applying multitasking to an embedded system based on a PIC microcontroller may look appealing. It permits full use of the PIC resources by serving more than one task at a time rather than staying idle waiting for an external event to occur and reacting accordingly from within an application. However, multitasking can turn applications into memory-hungry monsters that barely fit in your PIC. Task reentrancy is one approach that tackles expanded memory tasks, especially in small to medium PICs.

In this, the first part one of a three part series about reentrant multitasking and how you can realize it with two working examples of a Microchip's PICmicro MCU, I begin with an introduction to multitasking. In part two and three, available on Embedded.com, I'll get more into the meat of multitasking on the PIC.

Embedded multitasking is not new. It goes back some 30 years. The Intel 8080, Zilog Z80, and Motorola 68000 were popular microcontrollers 30 years ago. Interestingly, they were very similar in processing capabilities to many of today's microcontrollers. Those ancient devices had multiple general-purpose and index registers that could perform arithmetic and logic operations, and supported vectored interrupts and I/O ports. They had data buses with widths up to 16 bits, and address buses up to 24-bits wide. They also had large and powerful instruction sets that gave way to efficient programming and ran at moderate speeds of around 10 MHz. What's changed over the years is that today, that same processor is packaged with RAM and EPROM. Adding analog-to-digital modules and EEPROM gives us today's "microcontrollers."

Thirty years ago, full-fledged real-time operating systems (RTOSs) existed and professional features like multitasking and multiprocessing were applied and implemented. This brings up an interesting point: where exactly does multitasking fit with this technology? With a little research, I found that products are available to handle multitasking with an RTOS. Developers must then question whether the RTOS is really required for their application, or near-real-time would suffice.

Back then, in the absence of multitasking, serial task execution was the only way to run embedded systems. Figure 1 shows two tasks running in a system. Task #1 executes until it concludes its operation, then passes control to Task #2. Task #2 runs and eventually terminates causing system operation to end.