2011 Embedded Study: Big moves toward open OS, ARM

Highlights of the EE Times 2011 Embedded Market Study were presented
today (May 5) to a packed theater on the ESC Expo Floor by David Blaza,
VP of UBM Electronics, with color commentary by Ron Wilson, Editorial
Director, EDN, DesignLines, and ESC.

Some 1,886 embedded designers worldwide responded to the study, with
the majority (68.9%) from the US, close to one-fourth from Europe, and
the balance Asia. Three of the key issues emerging from the data are: A
shift from proprietary to open source operating systems, the
evolving rationale for changing processors, and the growing use of
ARM-based processors.

“The bulk of engineers using commercial operating systems are saying
they are going to switch to an open source OS in the next 12 months—as
to why that is, that’s is being hotly debated in the embedded world,”
said Blaza. “We’re not sure what the underlying motivation is—whether
some companies can’t justify the cost of commercial OS or we’re
actually seeing things liked Embedded Linux starting to cut into the
commercial market.”

To wit, over 20,000 copies of FreeRTOS have been downloaded from the
embedded.com site. Interested users can download it here. Three people
in the audience said they are using it in a production system today.

Wilson, however, cautioned that you have to take this information with
a grain of salt. “When you look at these kinds of studies, engineers
almost always overstate the rate of change what they are going to do
next. So divide it by at least a factor of two unless, of course, it’s
you talking.”

For those who changed processors, the top three reasons were:

• New processor had better features
• Previous processor too slow
• New processor had better future growth path

“This one surprises me somewhat because the accepted wisdom in the
industry is that nobody changes until they completely run out of runway
with the current processor,” said Wilson. “We are seeing a significant
trend from waiting until your new processor is too slow to jumping on a
new processor with a better feature set right away." He added that he
wasn’t sure if engineers are simply willing to take more risk or
whether the proliferation of ARM has made it less complex to switch to
another processor.

Indeed, ARM (from any vendor) topped the list of processors
currently used, followed by Freescale, TI, Microchip, and Atmel.
(Though it wasn’t clear from the results how many of the respondents
citing other companies are using ARM-based processors.) ARM-based
processors are not only making inroads in lots of new products coming
out, said Blaza, but over half the respondents are considering it for their
next project.

And one fun fact from the study: Digi-Key outranked Google when
engineers were asked to name their single favorite websites.

View a webinar of the entire 2011 Embedded Market Study.