Zephyr Project Welcomes ZEISS as a Platinum Member and Hunan University as an Associate Member

The Project also announces the Zephyr 3.5 release and how it enables

Sustainability Development Goals  

SAN FRANCISCO, October 31, 2023 – Today, the Zephyr® Project announced that ZEISS has joined as a Platinum member and Hunan University as an Associate member. 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.

Founded in 1846, ZEISS is an internationally leading technology enterprise operating in the fields of optics and optoelectronics with an annual revenue totaling 8.8 billion euros in 2022. With a portfolio aligned with future growth areas like digitalization, healthcare, and Smart Production, ZEISS is shaping the future of technology and constantly advancing the world of optics and related fields with its solutions. The company's significant, sustainable investments in research and development lay the foundation for the success and continued expansion of ZEISS' technology and market leadership. With over 40,000 employees, ZEISS is active globally in almost 50 countries (as of March 31, 2023).

Zeiss’ Vitalij Selynin, Team Lead Embedded Software Development, will join the Zephyr Project Governing Board while Dipak Shetty, Software Development Engineer for Embedded Systems, and Florian Guhl, Software Development Engineer for Embedded Systems will join the Technical Steering Committee (TSC).

“Our partnership with the Zephyr Project embodies our commitment to open-source innovation, and our support underscores our pursuit of industry standards and a more connected, efficient future for medical technology,” said Lauric Weber, Head of Platforms & Standards, Carl Zeiss Meditec AG.

Hunan University is a national key public research university located in Yuelu District, Changsha, Hunan, China. It is considered one of China's leading engineering research universities. Professor Guoqi Xie, who led the membership, is not new to the Zephyr RTOS. In fact, he developed an embedded real-time virtual machine named ZVM (Zephyr-based Virtual Machine) using ARM64 and gave a presentation about it this year at Zephyr Developer Summit. Watch it here.  

“After conducting research in embedded systems for many years, we believe that Zephyr has an excellent ecosystem. It will play a significant role in research at Hunan University and is also expected to become a hot spot for application in China’s future embedded operating system field," said Professor Xie.

ZEISS joins other Platinum members including Analog Devices, Antmicro, Baumer, Google, Intel, Meta, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, Qualcomm Innovation Center and T-Mobile.

Other Zephyr Project members include AVSystem, Arduino, BayLibre, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), Blues, Eclipse Foundation, FIWARE,, Friedrich-Alexander-University (FAU), Golioth, Infineon, Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS), IRNAS, Laird Connectivity, Linaro, Memfault, Northeastern University, Parasoft, Percepio, Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE), RISC-V, SiFive, Silicon Labs, Sternum, Synopsys, Technology Innovation Institute, Texas Instruments and Wind River.

Zephyr 3.5

Zephyr RTOS is easy to deploy, secure, connect and manage and supports more than 450 boards and multiple architectures including Arm (Cortex-A, Cortex-R, Cortex-M), Intel x86, ARC, Nios II, Tensilica Xtensa, RISC-V, SPARC, and MIPS. It 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. Zephyr is built with an emphasis on broad chipset support, security, dependability, long-term support releases and a growing open source ecosystem.

The project recently announced the availability of Zephyr 3.5, which saw a huge amount of work from the community. In fact, more than 200k lines of code and support for 45+ new boards were added by 514 contributors, 101 maintainers. Read about the features of 3.5 here.

Sustainability Development Goals

Contributors to the Zephyr Project are building small, scalable, real-time operating systems optimized for resource-constrained networks of devices. Such networks will help users to spin up an Internet of Things across multiple architectures, reduce their costs, and accelerate the launch of new products and services. Members of the Zephyr community imagine billions of connected embedded devices—simple connected sensors, LED wearables, modems, and small wireless gateways—that work to improve health and create decent jobs and equal opportunities on one hand and support diverse business models and markets on the other, with monitoring tools to strengthen institutions. As such, Zephyr meets several of the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals.

For example, Zephyr supports systems such as electrical grid monitoring with on-device machine learning. The RTOS supports the transition to renewable energy and helps improve the efficiency and dependability of electricity grids. More efficient grids make for lower carbon emissions (SDG 9). Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at The Linux Foundation, explained how the latter supported the transition to renewable energy and helped improve the efficiency and dependability of electricity grids. More efficient grids make for lower carbon emissions (SDG 13 Climate Action).

“On various smart devices, if you see a device that has suddenly gone from a day battery life to a week battery life, then its manufacturer has likely switched to using Zephyr underneath the covers,” said Stewart. “It is the breadth of implementations that makes Zephyr integral to digital innovation and infrastructure across industries where the Linux kernel is too big to fit.”

Read more about how Zephyr advances the SDGs in this blog or download the full Open Source for Sustainability report here.

To learn more about Zephyr RTOS, visit the Zephyr website and blog or sign up for the quarterly newsletter. 

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.

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