Update Feb 2024 - We’re pleased to share an important update regarding Azure RTOS. Reinforcing our commitment to innovation and community collaboration, Azure RTOS will be transitioning to an open-source model under the stewardship of the Eclipse Foundation, a recognized leader in hosting open-source IoT projects. With Eclipse Foundation as the new home, Azure RTOS becomes Eclipse ThreadX – a comprehensive embedded development suite including a small but powerful real-time operating system that provides reliable, ultra-fast performance for resource-constrained devices. Read more here.
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Two years ago Microsoft acquired one of the most deployed RTOS products in the embedded market, proven across a vast range of industries and use cases – from mobile phones and fitness trackers, to security systems and spacecraft. According to VDC Research, Azure RTOS ThreadX has been deployed in more than 10 billion devices worldwide. Many of these 10 billion embedded devices rely on high quality software to secure the brand value represented by the company’s products. From inception, Azure RTOS was designed to meet the needs of embedded systems developers with a closed-loop development process and rigorous testing. This process has been validated through 3rd party certification of the full Azure RTOS platform, including system kernel and the accompanying middleware components.
TÜV Certification
Azure RTOS core components have been certified according to the strict standards of SGS-TÜV Saar. The IEC-61508 standard specifies requirements for a closed-loop development process and calls for rigor in testing to achieve the certification. As part of the certification process, SGS-TÜV Saar has reviewed the extensive test suites for Azure RTOS core components. The Azure RTOS core component test suites required to achieve the certification effectively perform functional black box testing over each Azure RTOS core component code base. Each test suite exercises 100 percent of the generic Azure RTOS core component C code, which is validated by using code coverage analysis tools. This enables developers to use Azure RTOS in software development for even the most rigorous application requirements. Customers rely on Azure RTOS as the base platform for products that represent quality and reliability.
Reducing the time-to-market for building IoT devices
In many cases, industrial and durable goods applications require meeting a high bar in terms of reliability to be competitive. Reliable, real-time performance is required across a very wide range of applications from communication modems to home appliances to industrial devices. Development managers rely on pre-certified software to help mitigate risk to schedule and downstream testing of the complete system. Uncertainty in how an RTOS or downloaded middleware component behaves can result in multiple delays in test validation at the system level. This can lead to schedule delays, cost over-runs and reduced product quality. Beginning with a certified RTOS platform reduces the risk factors and speeds time to market.
When adding IoT connectivity to an embedded system, the increased complexity can cause new or erratic behavior in the original application. Using an RTOS to allocate system resources can aide in managing the transition to an IoT and the dependencies on connectivity and cloud technologies. When introducing an RTOS to an IoT application, development managers consider the features and capabilities of the RTOS platform as well as the stability of the code base. A certified RTOS platform mitigates risks in the development process as cloud integration introduces new challenges, risks and boundary conditions for an embedded system. The thorough testing requirements to achieve certification result in faster development time, less issues to debug, and a more smooth test cycle. Azure RTOS is the most complete RTOS platform with all the components certified making it suitable for IoT devices. Using a solid RTOS platform that is proven by 3rd-party standard certification requirements provides the most expeditious way to enable exciting new use cases with connected embedded systems. The SGS-TÜV Saar certifications apply to the standard Azure RTOS core components code base available on GitHub.
Learn more
We continue to work diligently on supporting high reliability applications with Azure RTOS. Our collective aim remains to enable customers to easily bring their ideas to life and truly unlock the opportunities available on the intelligent edge and the intelligent cloud. Find out more about why so many IoT industry leaders are excited about the benefits that Azure RTOS brings to their device solutions.
Microsoft
