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RTOS Market in Turmoil

November 8, 2011 | Comments | component engineering, element14, Embedded Technology, technology

By Ann Steffora Mutschler
Senior Correspondent, New Tech Press

With engineers clamoring for all things Android and open-source, the RTOS market is experiencing some major changes – although that depends on whom you ask.

A new entrant to the market, FreeRTOS, garnered the top spot UBM’s 2011 Embedded Market Study. However, Dr. Jerry Krasner of Embedded Market Forecasters has taken issue with these results.

Micrium moves up in market survey

According to his blog, Krasner pointed out, “In EMF’s 2011 Annual Survey of Embedded Developers…developers reported using an in-house RTOS (20.1%), Android (19.3%), XPE (16.5%) and Windows CE (15.9%). FreeRTOS was used by 0.9% of respondents. From our perspective, the suggestion that FreeRTOS use would exceed that of in-house, Android, XPE, CE, or VxWorks use is beyond any reasonable reality check.”

This of course has set the stage for confusion among all parties, as to which RTOS is really leading the pack.

There is no doubt, however, that internally developed RTOSs come out ahead of commercial ones.
David Blaza, VP at UBM said there is a “stubborn percentage of developers who stick with their home-grown OS and the reason for that is that they invest a lot of time and money in it and they know how it works – it does the job. Engineers are very, very conservative: they don’t really want to change. Just the sheer investment in code is monumental for them.”
But, Chris Rommel, VP at VDC Research pointed out, engineers are slowly shifting away from internally developed RTOSs because, “not every type of embedded type of device needs a robust RTOS.”

Users have stuck with in-house RTOSs mainly due to legacy assets and organizational issues. Plus, the scale of the organization or project comes into play – licensing a commercial RTOS can be cost-prohibitive to some companies, he said. CE devices don’t have a real-time requirement but there is, however, a big difference between a simple office printer and the cockpit controls of an airplane. Rommel did remind that it is not always clear cut in terms of OS choice since the value of the legacy work must be consideration in the decision-making process.

Krasner’s data also shows that in-house RTOS are still the biggest chunk of the market. “Year over year over year people have, as far as them writing new stuff, it’s not worth their money but there are an awful lot of people who have legacy stuff that they invested in 10 or 15 years ago and its much cheaper to hang onto that. The in-house stuff is not people saying they are going to spend six months writing their own RTOS – it’s that they have it, it’s legacy, it’s proprietary, its got feature that they want. In their mind, they are economizing what they already have instead of having to go out and pay.”

In terms of weighing various market research report results, UBM’s Blaza believes, “it is all about who is paying the piper, frankly. We just report what we see. We have the largest embedded audience in the world and we just report what we see and we had to put it in,” he said referring to the FreeRTOS results that some have questioned.

At the end of the day, the most critical data for engineering and marketing teams to get a handle on is what they want out of the market research they purchase or commission. As for vendor rankings…that may be best sorted out in a boxing ring.

Sponsored by element14.com

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Micrium climbs ranking among RTOS users

November 7, 2011 | Comments | technology

New Tech Press Managing Editor Joe Basques interviews Jean Labrosse on the RTOS company’s new relationship with Newark/Element14, and Micrium’s climbing status among engineers, according to the UBM/EETimes Embedded Market Survey.

Sponsored by Element14.

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Solyndra collapses. Why are the generals smiling?

Can Solar survive Solyndra aftermath?

November 1, 2011 | Comments | technology

By Lou Covey
Editorial Director, Footwasher Media

Solar Industry according to monty python

Solar industry is feeling much better now.

The recent collapse of a few high-profile solar energy companies, like Solyndra and Beacon Power, has caused even the most ardent fans of alternative energy to ask, “Can this industry survive?” The answer is a resounding, yes and no. It all depends on what government on all levels does.

Current public impressions of the health of any industry are colored by recent history. The financial failings of companies and industries considered “to big to fail” are what most people think of when hearing news about solar. But unlike the auto industry, with a population of three major players, the solar industry is filled with hundreds of start-ups struggling to establish themselves. Even if one, two or two dozen go down, it is still well populated.

“Although panel manufacturing is in trouble, the solar industry is doing relatively okay.” said Chirag Rathi, a senior consultant on the energy industry for Frost and Sullivan. “This is largely due to the advent of solar leasing companies in the U.S. One such company, SolarCity, was even give a contract to install solar power on up to 160,000 military homes. The program was supposed to be supported by the Department of Energy (DoE), which had extended a conditional commitment for a partial guarantee of a $344 million loan to support the project.”

Government subsidy and purchase are the key to whether the industry thrives. The DoE recently announced a new initiative to fund solar collection technology development and the Department of Defense (DoD) is under congressional mandate to reduce fossil-fuel consumption by 50 percent.

The reality is that all forms of energy production are heavily subsidized by government throughout the world. China has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in their solar panel industry. Spain’s financial difficulties are directly tied to the 100 percent subsidy it gave to the industry there, that it can no longer support. Even Germany, relatively healthy in the world economy, is struggling to maintain its levels of support to the industry. In the US, most of the government support – Federal, state and local – is actually tied to the installation industry.

“The purpose of government subsidies for renewables is to reduce costs and make them economically viable alternatives to fossil fueled electricity generation.” said Jay Holman, research manager for solar energy strategies at IDC. “As the cost of electricity from renewables drops, it is natural that the subsidies drop as well: this is an indication of progress. The trick with subsidies is to encourage industry growth without placing too heavy a burden on electricity ratepayers or taxpayers. A flat, constant subsidy won’t do the trick: it needs to drop in line with falling costs.”

Holman said Germany and Italy automatically reduce subsidies based on the amount of solar installed in the previous year, which provides transparency and predictability for the market.

“In the US, however, we send the issue back to congress every few years and let them duke it out. That is an incredibly inefficient approach that makes the subsidy situation extremely difficult to predict.”

Holman concluded that what the US industry needs is a long term subsidy plan that makes automatic subsidy adjustments based on the rate of installations and/or the cost of electricity from renewables.

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Find out why the generals are smiling at Element14.com

The fall of Solyndra was expected, and the DoD is happy

October 31, 2011 | Comments | technology

By Lou Covey
Editorial Director, Footwasher Media

The collapse of Solyndra has been the subject of both major news coverage and a foundational bit of political discourse recently. A closer look at the facts reveals that the reality of Solyndra and the solar industry is far from the speculation, especially when viewed from a military perspective.

Did Solyndra burn Obama? Maybe not.

In the wider scope, industry analysts and observers wonder what all the kerfuffle is about because everyone who knew the industry knew that Solyndra was not going to make it, especially in the current market.

“Solyndra’s CIGS solar panels were expensive,” according the Chirag Rathi of Frost and Sullivan. “The technology was innovative when it started out 6 years ago, but the global market place changed so fast in this time period that it became incredibly difficult for them to compete on price. Their per watt production cost was widely believed to be above the $6 mark, much higher than the poly-crystalline technology of $1.75 per watt and falling.”

According to the industry rule of thumb, for alternative energy to be competitive with fossil fuels, the cost per watt needs to fall below $1.

Rathi pointed out that the solar panel industry is in oversupply with the massive capacity coming out of China and Taiwan. “The Chinese government has provided more than $30 billion in soft loans to the domestic panel manufacturers.”

With all this common knowledge, the persistent question has been: Why did the Obama administration push forward with the loan program? The first answer is, well, that’s been the way things have been done for some time.

Contrary to conventional thought, alternative energy gets the lion’s share — by far — of any government investment in energy, including fossil fuels. According to the Institute for Energy Research, direct federal subsidy (that’s cash, not tax incentives) for renewable energy topped $14 Billion in 2010, while total subsidy of fossil fuel (gas, oil and coal) was just under $3.4 Billion… and 90 percent of the latter was in tax incentives, not actual cash payments. And since the Solyndra investment was only in the form of loan guarantees, it won’t come out of the federal budget until the bankruptcy is complete. In other words, the fall of Solyndra has not yet cost the government anything.

So what, specifically, did the government get out of the Solyndra deal? That’s where no one is looking, and where you need to look to find the more interesting story.

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