MCU and MPU Survey Results - Few Surprises

I recently reviewed the 2011 survey on embedded systems sponsored by EETimes, EmbeddedSystems and others and was surprised that there were no real surprises. Well, not no surprises, just very few.

Of course, I am very interested in MCUs and how they are changing in the market. It seemed to indicate that the processors were getting the peripherals right or better anyway and hardware designers liked this. It is no surprised that ARM is doing better and better; however the weak showing by Renesas, particularly after the NEC merger was a bit of a surprise. It is clearly a North American dominated survey.

There was a couple of other surprises. The rise of embedded Linux is no surprise - I expect this trend to continue and I also think that this has directly lead to the decline of other larger embedded operating systems like VxWorks, QNX Nucleus and Integrity.

The continued popularity of TI's OMAP is significant. It is clear that they have the correct mix of ARM and DSP functionality for a broad set of applications combined with the right tools and pricing. I expect that the Sitara and Integra lines will do well too - levering off this success with more specialized versions.

The apparent growth of freeRTOS - which isn't an RTOS but is just a kernel, combined with the growth of roll your own RTOS was to be expected. The reason for this is the very high pricing of the two best known MCU RTOS brands coupled with the lack of understanding of the true costs of integration, debug and test. The survey put test and debug numbers at 25% of the overall effort. It is likely closer to 50% and if managers computed the real lost market share for this period of delay, it is very likely that this would change.

Another related set of comments were made that the RTOS market was moving towards domination by the semiconductor vendors providing their own RTOSs for MCUs. Some even thing that they will move into hardware. It seems that the volume for most applications does not justify the loss of flexibility so hardware implementation will be limited to specialized applications.

Freescale has include the MQX RTOS free with its new MCUs. It is provided as a software component and it is likely that others may follow this trend. The real story here though is that many offerings of "free" this or that part of the total solution have been made: a free OS (and I mean a real OS) with an IDE sold by seat is one example. In any case, the offerings are always tied to something: a silicon vendor's hardware, an IDE lock-in and cost per developer, or extensive user development which masks the real cost. There is no free lunch!

Along with all of this, we see that users often don't pay attention to the real total cost of ownership, the largest component of which is time to market delay. Lean product development and platform based designs focused on open standards will still win the day for small, medium and large company development.