Established in Nuremberg back in March 2003, the embedded world Conference is now going into its 23rd edition in 2025. The original concept of a unique combination of an exhibition for engineers and technical management on one hand and a world-leading conference at the intersection of applied research and industrial applications on the other hand has proven extremely successful. embedded world Exhibition & Conference is driven by technology as well as applications with a strong focus on system and cross domain aspects. And it is driven by the embedded community – and its annual meeting point.
The official program is now online! Select your personal program and use the early bird ticket.
We are excited to announce that the Zephyr Project is now an official community partner with the embedded world Conference and Exhibition from 2024 onwards. As part of our collaboration, you can find Zephyr RTOS related talks from our community members at this year’s event. These sessions will cover various aspects of Zephyr, showcasing its capabilities and the latest advancements from the Zephyr open source real-time operating system.
March 11, 2025; 11:00 am – 11:30 am
What more and more people now simply call “Zephyr” is officially branded as “Zephyr RTOS”. But is it really _just_ an RTOS? Zephyr offers more than just an RTOS kernel; much like it would be unfair to compare the Linux kernel to a full-blown distribution such as Ubuntu or RHEL, Zephyr provides a complete embedded development platform that greatly simplifies the development of portable, hardware-agnostic applications. We’ll explore some of the unique features Zephyr offers that are key to enabling productive development, such as its testing framework, its module and dependency management system that greatly simplifies the provisioning of development environments, and more. If you’re already using Zephyr, this session will help you discover some hidden gems you might have missed. And if you’re still considering Zephyr,we’ll help you see the bigger picture especially if you’re maybe focusing on the “real-time” aspect too much without considering the broader ecosystem.
March 11, 2025; 11:30 am – 12:00 pm
Whether you’re working with diverse platforms or complex systems, this session will provide real-world use cases, best practices, and insights into how Zephyr RTOS can enhance your projects. Learn how to reduce complexity, improve scalability, and boost performance for long-term success. This lecture will be presented by Luka Mustafa, the founder and CEO of IRNAS. With over 10 years of experience developing embedded devices, IRNAS specializes in designing and building advanced products and systems for some of the most challenging environments. Their work spans a wide range of applications, from connected medical devices to mobile connected systems utilizing LoraWan, NB-IoT, LTE-M communication technologies among others, as well as complex electronics and fiber optic systems.
Luka will share valuable insights into the benefits of transitioning to Zephyr RTOS, not only from a developer’s perspective but also from the standpoint of investors and business owners. He will highlight how Zephyr can help streamline the development process, reduce technical complexity, and improve system performance, making it an ideal solution for developers. Additionally, from a business perspective, Luka will discuss how adopting Zephyr can lead to long-term cost savings, enhance product scalability, and create opportunities for faster time-to-market.
March 11, 2025; 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm
In the fast-paced realm of embedded systems, rapid product development is essential for market success. This presentation explores the advantages of Zephyr RTOS as a robust real-time operating system that helps developers navigate modern challenges. We’ll focus on its modular architecture, versatile toolchain, and its excellent and flexible support for many hardware platforms, alongside its integration with IoT and standard functionalities. Using a specific example from mobile optical measurement technology, we’ll illustrate how Carl Zeiss shortened their development cycle while ensuring software and product quality from the get-go, i.e. long before all hardware components were finalized, thanks to Zephyr RTOS. We’ll also critically examine its limitations, such as the lack of APIs for scientific instruments and automation, the learning curve for new developers, and the complexities of integrating into existing systems. Emphasizing the need for a reassessment of development processes, we’ll discuss the importance of engaging with the Zephyr community and actively participating in the project. Training developers on Zephyr’s functionalities is crucial for maximizing its potential. The goal of this presentation is to equip professionals and decision-makers with insights into leveraging Zephyr RTOS for efficient product development and to encourage well-prepared product initiatives.
March 11, 2025; 1:45 pm – 2:15 pm
Navigating the Zephyr RTOS requires a deep understanding of its concepts, tools and practical implementation. Navigating the Zephyr RTOS requires a deep understanding of its core concepts and practical implementation.Even with Zephyr’s extensive sample library, bridging the gap to successful product development remains challenging and requires additional knowledge and skills. This talk will provide a comprehensive overview of best practices, from overcoming the learning curve to leveraging Zephyr’s hardware abstraction layer for seamless custom hardware integration. We’ll delve into effective application architecture, code organization, and the use of built-in emulators for efficient test-driven development. Additionally, we’ll discuss the current state of safety certifications for Zephyr and explore opportunities to engage with the vibrant Zephyr community.
Key takeaways:
March 11, 2025; 2:15 pm – 2:45 pm
When designing battery-powered sensor devices, optimizing the power consumption of all components is crucial. While many sensors offer low-power modes, the generic sensor interface in Zephyr may not always utilize these modes efficiently. In this talk, I will provide an in-depth look at how Zephyr’s Power Management Subsystem works, how to integrate it into your device drivers, and how it can be used to further reduce power consumption. Using examples such as a battery level sensor and I2C sensors, I will demonstrate various strategies to manage and minimize a sensor’s energy usage. There are multiple approaches to integrating power management within the Zephyr operating system, and I will discuss how sensor characteristics influence which method results in longer battery life. Achieving optimal energy efficiency requires careful consideration of several parameters. Additionally, I will cover how to accurately capture power consumption data, explaining why conventional tools like multimeters may not be suitable for this task. Finally, based on the collected data, I will infer device usage patterns and validate the effectiveness of the power management implementation.
March 11, 2025; 2:45 pm – 3:15 pm
The Zephyr OS is based on a small-footprint kernel designed for use on resource-constrained and embedded systems: from simple embedded environmental sensors and LED wearables to sophisticated embedded controllers, smart watches, and IoT wireless applications. Zephyr provides product developers with a software platform that enables re-use of software while keeping the toolchain the same. Once Zephyr OS supports a particular wireless MCU and Bluetooth controller, everything else is abstracted, so software written for Zephyr is hardware agnostic. This paper examines the challenges and benefits of migrating a Bluetooth application to Zephyr OS and supporting it in the future. It also looks at the reasons why the Zephyr environment and development flow might be selected for a project, considering the pros and cons. The main section of the paper chronicles a developer’s journey, starting with setting up a Zephyr development environment and then moving on to porting an existing Bluetooth LE application. It describes the challenges faced and how any challenges are addressed along the way. The resulting paper is a guideline for developers who wish to adopt Zephyr OS for their Bluetooth application.
March 11, 2025; 4:00 pm – 4:30 pm
The Cybersecurity Resiliance Act (CRA) will be coming into effect in a few short years. Product makers will have different obligations than open source stewards for compliance. This talk will go into some of the requirements that open source stewards will be responsible for, and identify some best practices that product makers should consider when using open source components in their offerings. The Zephyr project has been working towards making it easier for product makers to comply with the CRA over the last few years, and will continue to work with the community to refine these capabilities. From automatic “Build SBOM” generation to LTS Vulnerability fixes, the project has some useful starting points. This talk will discuss what is available, and where some of the gaps will be for product makers to consider.
March 11, 2025; 4:30 pm – 5:00 pm
1. Introduction: Why Security Matters in Embedded Systems
The rising need for secure embedded systems
Key challenges: cybersecurity threats, scalability, IoT ecosystem vulnerabilities
2. Overview of Zephyr RTOS
Brief introduction to Zephyr’s architecture
Supported hardware platforms and community-driven development
Key features: modularity, scalability, open-source
3. Security in Zephyr: A Deep Dive
Native security features: secure boot, access control, and permissions
Memory protection and role of kernel services in isolating tasks
Integration with hardware-based security features (Trusted Execution Environments, etc.)
4. Compliance with Security Standards
How Zephyr addresses security certifications (e.g., PSA Certified, Functional Safety)
Zephyr’s role in meeting regulatory frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO standards
5. Use Cases: Zephyr in Real-World Secure Applications
Examples of Zephyr in industries requiring high security: medical devices, IoT, and automotive
Case study examples of secure, production-ready solutions with Zephyr
6. Conclusion: Zephyr as a Future-Proof, Secure RTOS
Long-term maintenance and security updates
March 11, 2025; 5:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Testing should be integral to the software development life cycle, especially embedded software. Embedded software engineers should always consider how they will test their implementation at every stage of the development process. They should establish the necessary testing infrastructure before writing even one line of code. Fortunately, The Zephyr Project RTOS contains an extensive testing ecosystem that embedded software engineers can leverage during development. Zephyr has infrastructure for unit testing and integration testing. In this talk, we will learn why testing is especially important for embedded software development and the tools that Zephyr offers to test during each stage of the development process (such as “Ztest” and “twister”). We will see real-world examples and demos of how to implement testing for a Zephyr application, run the tests, and evaluate the generated reports to understand how well we were able to evaluate our application.
March 12, 2025; 9:30 am – 1:00 pm
Making the leap from a superloop architecture to a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) marks a significant milestone for embedded developers. This half-day introductory course offers a foundational overview of RTOS principles, designed for engineers implementing an RTOS for the first time. Rather than focusing on a specific RTOS, like FreeRTOS or Zephyr, this session provides a general exploration of RTOS concepts and use cases. Participants will learn what an RTOS is, how it operates, and when it makes sense to use one. We’ll explore typical RTOS mechanisms—tasks, scheduling, and inter-task communication—demonstrating how these features can structure responsive, maintainable embedded systems. Additionally, the course covers RTOS partitioning techniques, showing how effective organization of tasks and resources can support efficient, reliable architectures. Safety and security aspects are also discussed, addressing how RTOS partitioning and isolation can help manage critical functions in safety-focused applications. By the end of this session, attendees will have a solid understanding of RTOS fundamentals, positioning them to make informed decisions about real-time operating systems in their own projects. Prior Knowledge: No prior knowledge about RTOSes is required.
March 12, 2025; 10:30 am – 11:00 am
Developing embedded software for regulated environments like medical devices presents unique challenges. Crucially, we need to document how the software design fulfills stated product requirements. While functional testing remains dominant for verifying functional suitability, deriving and maintaining effective test suites can quickly become cumbersome. This talk explores a novel approach to this longstanding problem. We leverage NASA’s FRETish method for formally capturing requirements. We will talk about how the formal nature of FRETish requirements allows for automatic test case generation leveraging the Robot Framework. The latter was specifically chosen as it is partially supported by Zephyr’s test harness today and allows to utilize twister for automated test execution of these test suites on real hardware. This method has the potential to streamline testing, offering benefits such as reduced time and maintenance efforts as well as accurate coverage metrics from very early on in the project’s lifecycle. We’ll discuss our progress in implementing this approach, the challenges we encountered, and potential solutions for deeper integration with the Zephyr project.
March 12, 2025: 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
This workshop supports embedded developers in exploring the Zephyr Project with a focus on IoT development. Participants will gain foundational knowledge of Zephyr and engage in hands-on exercises. This workshop will show interactively how to set up a development environment and how to configure a workspace (out-of-tree) application with Zephyr. It will cover topics like board abstractions, RTOS features and higher layer software subsystems such as the Sensor API, BLE stack and the networking stack. Hands-on exercises will provide attendees with a comprehensive guide to command-line interactions, probing sensors via I2C Shell, and retrieving sensor
data directly. Participants will learn to build modular applications using ZBus. Through theoretical insights and practical examples, attendees will enhance
their understanding of Zephyr’s capabilities in IoT applications. A GitHub repository will be provided, serving as a reference and learning resource beyond the session.
Prior Knowledge:
Participants attending the workshop are encouraged to have a basic understanding of embedded systems and programming concepts, although this is not strictly necessary. Familiarity with command-line interfaces and general software development practices will be beneficial. A pre-installed native Zephyr setup on their personal machine is recommended, as it allows for direct interaction with hardware and a deeper understanding of the development process. However, this is not a requirement, as a virtualized environment via GitHub Codespaces will be available, providing an accessible alternative for those without a local Zephyr installation. Attendees should bring a notebook to participate fully in the hands-on exercises. This ensures they can follow along with the workshop activities, whether working locally or using the virtualized setup.
Learning Outcomes:
Participants will get a good understanding of the Zephyr Project’s core capabilities, including setting up a development environment and using the
Zephyr Shell for sensor interactions and peripheral bringup. Attendees will gain hands-on experience with I2C and sensor data retrieval, as well as extending applications using ZBus. They will be equipped to develop IoT applications using Zephyr, using both hardware and virtualized environments, thereby enhancing their embedded systems development skills.
March 12, 2025; 3:30 pm – 4:00 pm
There is a growing acceptance of open source in safety-critical domains and the collaborative efforts to integrate open source projects (particularly Linux) into products. The talk discusses the challenges faced when integrating open source technologies into highly complex systems that must adhere to stringent quality and safety-integrity standards. It emphasizes the importance of tools, automation, and traceability mechanisms to ensure compliance with standards like ASPICE, ISO26262, ISO61508 and ISO21434. By showcasing the collaborative efforts of open source projects such as ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety-Critical Applications), the Zephyr Project, and the Xen Project the talk addresses the specific requirements of safety-critical applications. These projects are actively working towards developing mechanisms and approaches that align with the expectations of safety-critical domains and can be integrated into system level analysis. By providing a reproducible system architecture, a foundation for companies and projects seeking to adopt Open Source Software in safety-critical applications is offered. Overall, this talk underscores the need for consistent linkage between code, tests, and requirements within the Linux kernel ecosystem including adjacent system elements like RTOSs and virtualization.
March 13, 2025; 3:00 pm – 3:30 pm
As the automotive industry transitions from distributed function-specific systems to centralized computing and software-defined vehicles, a range of operating systems is required to meet diverse and often conflicting needs. Linux and Android, with their flexibility and proven track records in numerous industries, are set to play a key role in future vehicle platforms. However, as vehicle manufacturers deploy applications with increasingly stringent requirements — safety, security, performance, predictability — a more nuanced approach to software architecture is necessary. Real-time operating systems (RTOS), optimized for deterministic latency, will remain essential for safety-critical use cases. In addition, lightweight execution environments like Zephyr offer scalable solutions for constrained devices, while AUTOSAR continues to provide a standardized framework for ensuring interoperability and compliance in embedded automotive software. Together, these components — Linux, RTOS, Zephyr, AUTOSAR, and Android — must complement each other to form a cohesive in-vehicle software architecture that meets the demands of modern automotive innovation. In this presentation, we will adopt the perspective of a software architect, show when and why to use these different solutions, their benefits and limitations, how to combine them (e.g. using modern hardware, virtualization) and how this could apply to other industries.
March 13, 2025; 3:30 pm – 4:00 pm
This talk provides an overview of how Zephyr RTOS is used in the reference software stack for Arm Reference Design-1 AE. The Arm Reference Design-1 AE introduces the concept of a high-performance Arm® NeoverseTM V3AE Application Processor (Primary Compute) system augmented with an Arm® Cortex®-R82AE based Safety Island for scenarios where additional system safety monitoring is required.
The Safety Island subsystem reference software for this system runs multiple instances of Zephyr RTOS to demonstrate main usecase examples. The talk will cover high level details of the sw stack and how Zephyr project has helped our team achieve this objective.
