emPower OS enables production during chip shortages

24th June 2021

Alex Lynn

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SEGGER has introduced its all-in-one embedded operating system emPower OS. It uses proven components from the software toolbox that already lays the groundwork for many customer products and for SEGGER’s successful J-Link debugger. emPower OS provides an out-of-the-box experience for complex embedded software applications on close to one thousand hardware platforms while supporting many more.

The emPower OS software package includes all core components (RTOS, GUI, File System) and communication software (TCP/IP, USB Device, USB-Host, Modbus), as well as IoT Toolkit, Security and Compression modules serving all the software needs of modern embedded industrial and IoT devices.

The available hardware support enables abstraction of the application from the used microcontroller. This means being able to quickly switch the hardware without completely rewriting the software. Software development is simplified to merely switching a few drivers, adapting the remaining direct hardware accesses and testing functionality.

This provides a solution to supply shortages on the hardware side. The redesign process could possibly be finished before the estimated arrival time of silicon vendor’s delivery.

"Because of the chip crisis, many industrial companies are rethinking their software development processes – how to break dependencies and gain flexibility,” explained SEGGER CEO Ivo Geilenbrügge. "emPower OS offers the flexibility to prevent production downtime."

The root cause of production challenges today is the chip shortage. Still, this is not the only challenge responsible managers need to keep in mind. Other challenges are suppliers changing owners, suppliers changing license models, changing pricing or even canceling a product, political decisions that prevent deliveries and many more. You can obtain further information on how to deal with these challenges in our risk management article at SEGGER’s blog.

emPower OS is a high-performance software platform for embedded systems and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It is optimised for high performance and a small memory footprint. In many cases, the small memory footprint enables the use of a typical microcontroller, eliminating the need for expensive external memory, keeping the cost of the embedded computing system to a minimum.

SEGGER’s embedded operating system emPower OS is offered as source code under a perpetual license model with a one-time cost without hidden follow-up costs. The customer always owns the product license. As part of the Embedded Studio PRO package, emPower OS is offered in object code.