The Zephyr Project grows IoT ecosystem

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The Zephyr Project, an open source project to build a real-time operating system (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT), has announced that its IoT ecosystem now has the support of more than 100 developer boards with the addition of six new members.

These industry and academic leaders include Antmicro, DeviceTone, SiFive, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and Northeastern University.

The Zephyr Project aims to establish a neutral community where silicon vendors, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Original Design Manufacturer (ODMs) and Independent Software Vendor (ISVs) can contribute technology to reduce the cost and accelerate time to market for IoT devices.

At launch in 2016, Zephyr was supported on only four boards including Arduino 101, Arduino Due, Intel Galileo Gen 2 and the FRDM-K64F Freedom development board from NXP Semiconductors. now it supports more than 100 boards comprising of different architectures: ARM, x86, ARC, NIOS II, XTENSA, and RISCV32 processor families.

Along with the newly announced members the Zephyr IoT ecosystems also includes companies like: Intel, Linaro, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, Synopsys, and others.

“Developers have many choices when it comes to platforms. Zephyr offers the smallest memory footprint and a secure and flexible RTOS that extends functionality of IoT devices,” said Anas Nashif, Chair of the Zephyr Project Technical Steering Committee and a Software Engineer at Intel's Open Source Technology Centre.

In addition to these new members, the Zephyr technical community recently welcomed Thea Aldrich, a longtime open source participant, as a Project Evangelist and Developer Advocate. She will be an active contributor to the technical roadmap, teaching Zephyr to new developers raising awareness of the project and coordinating communities.

The project has a large technical community with more than 300 contributors on Github collaborating daily to create patches and help advance and manage new versions of Zephyr code that easily integrates with embedded devices regardless of architecture.