Research on RT-Thread Porting Method for Resource-Constrained Chips: A Case Study of TH4001

Integrated Circuits and Embedded Systems ›› 0

Integrated Circuits and Embedded Systems ›› 0 DOI: 10.20193/j.ices2097-4191.2026.0038

Research on RT-Thread Porting Method for Resource-Constrained Chips: A Case Study of TH4001

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Abstract

RT-Thread is an open-source embedded Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) that has been widely adopted in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain due to its rich components and excellent tailorability. TH4001 is a 32-bit Reduced Instruction Set Computer-V (RISC-V) processor chip targeted at lightweight embedded control scenarios. It suffers from limited on-chip Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) capacity and is not equipped with standard hardware peripherals such as the Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART). To date, no mature solution exists for porting the RT-Thread operating system to the TH4001 platform. To fill this gap, this paper presents a complete RT-Thread porting scheme for the TH4001 chip, focusing on addressing the constraints of insufficient SRAM capacity and the lack of UART peripherals. The scheme adopts a hybrid loading and running architecture for system booting, and leverages the Programmable I/O (PIO) module to emulate a UART interface for console output. Experimental results demonstrate that the ported RT-Thread system boots successfully, runs the user main thread, and correctly performs context switching. This work serves as a reference solution for porting RTOS to similarly resource-constrained RISC-V chips.

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RT-Thread / real-time operating system / Porting Method / RISC-V / TH4001

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Research on RT-Thread Porting Method for Resource-Constrained Chips: A Case Study of TH4001[J]. Integrated Circuits and Embedded Systems. 0 https://doi.org/10.20193/j.ices2097-4191.2026.0038

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Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of High-end Integrated Circuit Design and Integration Technology(Sun Yat-Sen University)(2024B1212020007)

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