Reconfiguring RTOS design for the IoT

摘要

With the rollout of the Internet of Things, intelligent devices are proliferating, and they will all need processors, real-time operating systems, and applications to run on top of those operating systems. Today, design often begins with hardware, then moves on to the operating system and finally the app. Embedded systems designers can buy an operating system, but an off-the-shelf RTOS may be too complex and costly (often entailing royalties) for the project at hand. Consequently, said Bob Zeidman, president of Zeidman Technologies, over half of embedded software developers write their own operating systems. That presents its own problems-developers need operating-system expertise. Zeidman wants to ease that requirement by reconfiguring the whole design process. "What we want to do is enable you to write your applications in an abstract sense-you don't care what the hardware is, and you don't care what the operating system is," said Zeidman in an interview at the Embedded Systems Conference Boston in May. The enabling technology for this reconfiguration is the company's SynthOS tool, which allows embedded developers to automatically generate operating systems yet maintain full visibility into the code.