GeMRTOS is free to download. Uncompress the archive and copy the /ip subdirectory into your Quartus® Prime project folder — GeMRTOS then appears in Platform Designer as a component you can add like any other IP.
Built and delivered with Quartus® Prime 23.1, targeting Nios V soft processors. Nios II is supported as a legacy route.
What is in the download
- The GeMRTOS controller and kernel as Platform Designer IP components.
- Ten worked example applications, each with an automated output check.
- A Windows simulation layer, so you can run the examples and explore the API before you have a board.
- Build and deployment scripts, and the user and development manual.
The ten examples
Each example is a complete, buildable application. They are ordered so that each one introduces a single new concept.
| Example | What it demonstrates | Needs |
|---|---|---|
| 01 — Hello task | The minimum viable application; board smoke test | — |
| 02 — Tasks and delays | The task model: periodic and one-shot, priorities, offsets, suspend and resume | — |
| 03 — Semaphores | All four semaphore flavours, timeouts, priority-ceiling protocol | — |
| 04 — Dining philosophers | Contention and deadlock avoidance at scale | LEDs |
| 05 — Message queue pub/sub | Message queues as publish/subscribe, fan-out, late subscribers | — |
| 06 — Triggers and ISR | Hardware triggers and ISR-as-task on a real interrupt | — |
| 07 — Multiprocessor scheduling | Partitioned, global and exclusion-limited scheduling side by side | Two processors |
| 08 — Signals and frozen mode | Deadline-overrun and system-backlog fault handling, self-recovering | — |
| 09 — Network HTTP server | lwIP with an HTTP server, SSI/CGI and AJAX | Ethernet, LEDs |
| 10 — Full demo | Everything combined; the regression reference | Ethernet, LEDs |
A board without Ethernet cannot run 09 or 10; a single-processor system cannot run 07. Everything else runs anywhere, including in the Windows simulation.
Board and kit demo projects
- MAX 10 FPGA — the reference platform. The full example catalogue is delivered and exercised on this board.
- DE2-115 — Cyclone IV E board project.
- BeMicro SDK — Cyclone IV E board project.
For additional board support, contact us at: info@gemrtos.com
About the licence file
The GeMRTOS IP core is delivered encrypted, so Quartus® Prime needs a FlexLM licence file (.dat) to use it. The download includes both a fixed licence, for a single machine, and a float licence, for a licence server shared by several workstations. Both work with any network adapter.
If you already run a FlexLM server for other IP and want to add GeMRTOS to it, a licence tied to that server’s network adapter can be issued on request — we need the MAC address of the machine running the FlexLM server, the same detail Altera asks for when issuing licensed Quartus® Prime. Contact us here.
Full terms, including the software licence and the conditions for academic, research and commercial use, are on the licence page.