The Zephyr RTOS has seen tremendous growth recently, with almost 1000 contributors and hundreds of platforms supported. Its vendor-neutral, all-encompassing nature has let it spill into various use cases, areas and device types. One of the fields in which we have been pioneering the use of Zephyr is the context of FPGA/FPGA SoC and on the RISC-V architecture – both in hard and soft implementations. We have recently become a Platinum member of the project to underline our commitment and take a leading role in the project alongside Google, Facebook, Arm, Intel, NXP, Nordic and others.
At its core, Zephyr is a secure and lightweight real-time operating system and often an excellent choice for applications where Linux is simply too complex and where tight control over all aspects of the execution are needed. This befits especially the low-to-mid-end real time use cases in FPGA (which are often used in scenarios like ML acceleration, video transcoding etc. that require low latency), either alongside or instead of “large” OS like Linux.