The Zephyr Project Grows IoT Ecosystem with Support for More Than 100 Developer Boards and New Members

Six New Industry and Academic Members Join the Open Source group to Create a Secure and Safe IoT RTOS

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Aug 09, 2018, 11:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 9, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Zephyr™ Project, an open source project to build a real-time operating system (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced growth of its IoT ecosystem with support for more than 100 developer boards and the addition of six new members. These industry and academic leaders include Antmicro, DeviceTone, SiFive, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and Northeastern University.

Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the Zephyr Project aims to establish a neutral community where silicon vendors, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Original Design Manufacturer (ODMs) and Independent Software Vendor (ISVs) can contribute technology to reduce the cost and accelerate time to market for developing the billions of IoT devices.

Over 100 boards supported
The dedication and talent of the growing Zephyr technical community has resulted in a significant expansion in board support as well as attracting more new developers each month. At launch in 2016, Zephyr was supported on only four boards including Arduino 101, Arduino Due, Intel® Galileo™ Gen 2 and the FRDM-K64F Freedom development board from NXP® Semiconductors. Zephyr now supports more than 100 boards comprising of different architectures: ARM, x86, ARC, NIOS II, XTENSA, and RISCV32 processor families. For a complete list of boards and details, visit http://docs.zephyrproject.org/boards/boards.html.

Growing Ecosystem
In addition to this technical milestone, the Zephyr IoT ecosystem recently added new members including Antmicro, DeviceTone, SiFive, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and Northeastern University. These companies join industry leaders such as Intel, Linaro, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, Synopsys, and others.

"Developers have many choices when it comes to platforms. Zephyr offers the smallest memory footprint and a secure and flexible RTOS that extends functionality of IoT devices," said Anas Nashif, Chair of the Zephyr Project Technical Steering Committee and a Software Engineer at Intel's Open Source Technology Centre. "We are excited to welcome these member companies into our IoT ecosystem and look forward to collaborating with them to create and support a customizable, embedded open source platform."

In addition to these new members, the Zephyr technical community recently welcomed Thea Aldrich, a longtime open source participant, as a Project Evangelist and Developer Advocate. She will be an active contributor to the technical roadmap, teaching Zephyr to new developers raising awareness of the project and coordinating communities.

She joins the already robust technical community that has more than 300 contributors on Github collaborating daily to create patches and help advance and manage new versions of Zephyr code that easily integrates with embedded devices regardless of architecture.

"A few years ago, I used Zephyr OS to solve many of the technical issues I was encountering with a wearables solution I created," said Thea Aldrich, Zephyr Project Evangelist and Developer Advocate. "Zephyr's ease of use and scalability helped me with my solution and I was welcomed into this highly passionate open source community. Needless to say, I stumbled upon something more than just an RTOS and I could not be happier to have the opportunity to contribute to this community." Learn more about Thea here.

New Member Quotes:

"Antmicro is joining the Zephyr Project to confirm its long-term commitment to this community-driven and security-oriented RTOS, which we see as a de-facto standard for the next generation IoT systems," said Michael Gielda, VP Business Development at Antmicro. "Zephyr is an especially good choice for devices based on new open architectures such as RISC-V, and developed with new methodologies using tools such as Renode, Antmicro's multi-node simulation framework for IoT security, quality and interoperability testing, which is already a recommended Zephyr tool in use by our Zephyr customers worldwide."

"DeviceTone is pleased to join the growing Zephyr community," said Philip DesAutels, Chief Product Officer of DeviceTone. "We plan to leverage Zephyr's ease of use, flexibility and network to create secure embedded devices under our DeviceTone solutions. We look forward to collaborating with the IoT ecosystem and sharing our expertise with simplified connected product development."

"The I-SENSE Group of ICCS research addresses the evolving connectivity needs of embedded devices including mobility communication services, intelligent transport systems, environmental monitoring, applications for next generation emergency services and infrastructure monitoring for foundation of future smart cities," said Dr. Angelos Amditis, Research Director, I-SENSE Group of ICCS. "We believe the Zephyr Project is an accelerator of hyper-connectivity among embedded devices, network components and the cloud. As such, we're excited to be part of the project and working with members who are interconnected across various smart domains of a greater IoT ecosystem."

"At Northeastern University, we have a large group of researchers working on cybersecurity and privacy," said Long Lu, Assistant Professor of Computer Science for Northeastern University. "IoT security is one of the focused research areas and we recognize Zephyr's leading role in building secure IoT OS. Joining the project allows us to timely transfer our research outcome to practice and stay informed of real-world security problems facing IoT devices."

"RISC-V is about creating open source platforms for the entire world to collaborate on, but hardware doesn't exist without software," said Jack Kang, VP of Product at SiFive. "Given SiFive's leadership role in the RISC-V ecosystem, joining the Zephyr Project is a natural step, as the vision of a well-supported, robust open-source RTOS is important to the RISC-V revolution."

About the Zephyr™ Project
The Zephyr Project is a small, scalable real-time operating system for use on resource-constrained systems supporting multiple architectures. To learn more, please visit www.zephyrproject.org.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world's top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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SOURCE The Zephyr Project