Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers

Going forward, we expect to see non-traditional IoT software and infrastructure platform vendors looking closely at the embedded OS space. A compelling OS offering could drive millions of device signups for IoT services platforms, such as AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure, and GE Predix, which derive recurring revenue from services rendered to an installed base of devices. Onboarding an OS offering (or complementing Windows 10 IoT Core with an MCU-focused OS in Microsoft’s case) would allow these players to potentially hook analytics and connectivity services into a portion of the billions of MCUs that are shipped yearly, bumping up services revenue substantially.

We see this acquisition as a substantial, missed opportunity for leading MCU vendors, such as Renesas, Microchip/Atmel, and Qualcomm/NXP/Freescale, who we had shortlisted as likely acquirers. Micrium competitors Express Logic and WITTENSTEIN would be rational targets for the next round of RTOS acquisitions.

We had expected Microsoft to refocus its attention on the MCU space (perhaps with a derivative of WinCE) but they have been more focused on providing runtimes for maker boards and playing catch up with AWS, than building out the bottom end of their OS portfolio. Ditto Google with Android Things.

Think this is a great move on Amazon's part providing, but not forcing, an easy on-ramp to AWS for the billions of MCU-powered devices that ship every year.

For example if your thing is attached to a sensor that spits out 47 bytes of sensor data every N clock cycles, and has a buffer that is 94 bytes, then you damn well better be reading that thing every N*2 clock cycles with a hard guarantee that your routine is finished copying all 94 bytes of data by the time it finishes (including time for interrupts).

This gets complicated when you have specific requirements about when data is available or other things too (e.g. if reading data requires pulling pin X low, waiting at least Y clock cycles, and then reading all data in no more than Z clock cycles before returning pin X back to high, then good luck doing that in a normal OS where you have no hard time guarantees).

Can't wait until the GPL is a rarely used license.