Customized IoT operating systems based on Linux and Zephyr
Zephyr is the lightweight RTOS developed for resource-constrained and embedded IoT. Linux is an open-source extensible operating system which can also be adapted for real-time and IoT applications.
The company is coming to market with a subscription business model that will allow these microplatforms to be supplied with in-built security and continually tested in deployment and upgraded over-the-air (OTA) to maintain that security.
“You get your operating system tailored to your needs, with security, plus a full testing and lifetime updates. That can be used with any cloud provider – Amazon, Google, IBM, whoever,” Foundries.io chairman Ian Drew, who was previously chief marketing officer at ARM, told eeNews Europe. “This allows OEMs to keep control of their data.”
Foundries.io microPlatforms are being used to enable support for hardware security elements, factory automation and offering lifetime management for IoT/Edge devices. The company has worked with Rambus Inc. to enable support for the Rambus Crypto Manager Root of Trust (CMRT).
The LmP is configurable to customer product requirements across multiple market segments, while maintaining a minimal common, secure, OTA updatable code base. Customer engineering teams from startups to industry leading enterprises are able to manage their own builds of the LmP.
Drew said that Foundries.io has been working with a Tier 1 consumer product manufacturer that insists on anonymity. “This company, a major consumer OEM, is adopting the OS for use on their manufacturing equipment. That’s hundreds or even thousands of machines across tens of sites around the world,” he said.
Next: Inside Toradex
A second customer who can be named is Toradex AG (Horw, Switzerland), a manufacturer of single-board computers based on ARM processors. Foundries.io’s Linux microPlatform (LmP) is included in Torizon, which is their Linux platform. LmP simplifies the process of developing and monitoring embedded software.
Brandon Shibley, CTO at Toradex, commented: “Foundries.io has been a valuable partner for Toradex in realizing our vision of Torizon: a secure, open, versatile and easy to use embedded computing platform based on the Linux microPlatform for Toradex System-on-Modules.”
“Whereas ARM went for a license fee and a per-chip royalty model at Foundries.io we’ve decided to offer a fixed price subscription model. You pay between $10,000 and $30,000 per year per product and you get ongoing software security and OTA support. We are as agnostic as possible about the underlying hardware. The three architectures we are being asked about most are ARM, x86 and RISC-V.”
One of the co-founders of Foundries.io is George Grey who had previously led the Linaro organization from its formation in 2010.
Drew said the company has raised $2 million to date from UK and US venture capital companies but already has $1 million of revenue booked for 2019.
Related links and articles:
The Linux and Zephyr microPlatforms are free at github.com/foundriesio
News articles:
First LTS release of Linux-based IoT RTOS
Linux meet RISC-V: open source groups team up
Linaro organisation, with ARM, aims for end-end open source IoT code
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