Doulos, Honda, Hubble Network, IAR, inovex and Microchip Technology join the Zephyr Project as it gets Closer to Safety Certification

See Zephyr RTOS at FOSDEM on February 1-2

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Zephyr® Project announced that Doulos, Honda, Hubble Network, IAR, inovex and Microchip Technology have joined as Silver members. Zephyr, an open source project at the Linux Foundation that builds a secure, connected and flexible RTOS for future-proof and resource-constrained devices, is easy to deploy and manage. It is a proven RTOS ecosystem created by developers for developers.

Last year, the project achieved several milestones including obtaining written concept approval for IEC 61508 certification of the Zephyr kernel. The Zephyr Project will continue to advance the functional safety and quality management processes for a safety element out of context (SEooC)  that meets the requirements of the IEC 61508 standard, which is a globally recognized benchmark for ensuring the functional safety of systems, and a foundation for other safety standards. Compliance with IEC 61508 ensures that a system is developed and maintained with a rigorous approach to minimizing risks and increasing  operational reliability. By integrating these processes into the development lifecycle, Zephyr aims to ensure traceability, transparency and accountability at every stage, from initial design to deployment and maintenance.

"Our commitment to achieving full compliance underscores the Zephyr Project's dedication to delivering a real time operating system that adheres to the highest safety and quality standards," said Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Systems at the Linux foundation. "This not only aligns with industry expectations but also instills confidence among product makers and developers across market segments such as industrial automation, energy, and automotive."

Other recent technical milestones include support for more than 750 boards running embedded microcontrollers from Arm and RISC-V to Tensilica, NIOS, ARC and x86 as single and multicore systems and launched the 3.7 Long Term Support (LTS) release in July 2024, providing product makers with a stable foundation for building future-proof embedded connected products.

A Strong Ecosystem 
Zephyr RTOS has a growing set of software libraries that can be used across various applications and industry sectors such as Industrial IoT, wearables, machine learning and more. It is built with an emphasis on broad chipset support, security, dependability, long-term support releases and a growing open source ecosystem.

Doulos, a 30-year-old technical training company that has helped train more than 5,400 companies spanning 84 countries, has courses available in-person, live online and self-paced formats in hardware design and verification languages and methodologies, embedded software, AI and deep learning.

"We are delighted to be partnering with the Zephyr Project," said Thomas Winkler, Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Doulos. "Doulos provides high-quality training that covers every stage of designing and developing an embedded system. Our training helps engineers navigate the Zephyr learning curve, with our renowned and extensive course materials, experienced instructors, and practical hands-on exercises enabling engineers to be project ready. Together with our partners in the community, we look forward to further developing the Zephyr ecosystem."

Honda is a mobility company powered by everyone's dreams, creating mobility that helps and inspires people, in a wide range of fields such as motorcycles, automobiles, power products and aircraft.

"Honda has a remarkable position as the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer and the world's largest manufacturer of internal combustion engines," said Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. "By joining OpenChain last year and now the Zephyr Project, Honda has underlined its position as a thought leader in open source. We are fortunate to have companies like Honda driving lasting change."

Hubble Network is a global satellite and terrestrial BLE network that enables any Bluetooth device to connect seamlessly via a simple software framework - no hardware change required. This innovative solution delivers reliable, cost-effective communication, empowering groundbreaking applications across industries.

"At Hubble Network, we are fundamentally changing what's possible with Bluetooth devices," said Alex Haro, cofounder and CEO at Hubble Network. "By offering an SDK that transforms standard BLE chips into globally connected devices, we are breaking down barriers to connectivity and enabling our customers to innovate without limits. Whether it's monitoring sensors in remote locations or tracking assets in dynamic environments, Hubble ensures reliable communication where other networks fall short. We are excited to partner with the Zephyr Project to bring this vision to life, combining their expertise in open source embedded development with our mission to make global connectivity accessible to all."

Since 1983, IAR has provided software and services for embedded development of over one million embedded applications for a wide range of industries, including Automotive, Industrial Automation, IoT, MedTech, Military, and Public Safety sectors. With support for 15,000 devices from over 70 semiconductor partners, IAR is dedicated to fostering innovation and enabling customers' success.

"Joining the Zephyr Project aligns perfectly with IAR's vision of supporting embedded developers with reliable tools and solutions," said Thomas Andersson, Chief Product Officer at IAR. "As part of this growing ecosystem, we are committed to sharing our expertise in optimizing performance and reliability for Zephyr-based applications. This collaboration highlights our focus on bridging the gap between open source innovation and commercial-grade solutions, empowering developers to deliver safe, high-quality systems that meet industry demands."

inovex is an IT project center that focuses on 'Digital Transformation'. The company works closely with partners from industry and research to develop ideas for new technologies in areas such as the Internet of Things, e-health, energy, Generative AI, web and UI and UX.

"For us, there is no doubt that the Zephyr Project has become the de-facto standard operating system for small, embedded devices," said Collin Rogowski, Head of inovex Academy. "Its wide support by hardware vendors, middleware providers and product companies is a testament to its outstanding quality and thoughtful design, that makes it so easy to work with and extend. It truly opens a new chapter for embedded SW development and is well positioned to answer the need for open source solutions in today's markets. We decided to join the Zephyr Project, because we want to enable our customers to use this technology in their respective products by offering them software development and training for the Zephyr ecosystem. We believe that to do this well, we cannot just be beneficiaries of Zephyr RTOS, we also have to be active contributors."

Microchip is a provider of smart, connected and secure embedded control and processing solutions. Its development tools and product portfolio enable over 100,000 customers to create designs across the industrial, automotive, consumer, aerospace and defense, communications and computing markets.

"The Zephyr Project is aligned with Microchip's guiding value, 'Customers Are Our Focus,' underscoring our commitment to delivering secure, scalable and flexible solutions for embedded developers," said Rod Drake, corporate vice president of Microchip's high performance microcontroller business unit. "This collaboration enables developers to leverage Microchip's extensive portfolio of microcontrollers that are Functional Safety ready or compliant with Zephyr RTOS to accelerate their development cycle and time to market."

These new members join Ac6, Alif Semiconductor, Arduino, Arm, AVSystem, Baumer, BayLibre, Blues, Ezurio, Golioth, Infineon, IRNAS, Linaro, Memfault, MicroEJ, Percepio, Qt Group, Renesas Electronics, Silicon Labs, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, Texas Instruments and Wind River as Silver members.

Zephyr Project Platinum members include Analog Devices, Antmicro, CARIAD, Google, Intel, Meta, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, Qualcomm Innovation Center and ZEISS. 

FOSDEM
Zephyr will be featured at FOSDEM, which takes place on February 1-2 in Brussels, Belgium, in several presentations by community and project leaders. Visit the event page to learn more.

About the Zephyr Project
The Zephyr® Project is an open source, scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) supporting multiple hardware architectures. To learn more, please visit www.zephyrproject.org.

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, OpenChain, OpenSSF, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, Zephyr, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact:
Maemalynn Meanor
Director of Public Relations & Communications
[email protected]

SOURCE The Zephyr Project