Embedded Software & Firmware Development Services

Decision is driven by hardware budget, real-time requirements, regulatory profile and field-update strategy. Bare-metal (no scheduler) when you have a single tight control loop on a Cortex-M0/M0+, sub-kilobyte RAM, and battery life is the dominant concern — typical for sensors and BLE peripherals. Zephyr RTOS when you need a real-time scheduler, networking stack (TCP/IP, BLE, Thread, Matter), multiple concurrent tasks, but RAM budget is 32–512 KB and you want a Linux Foundation-governed project with long-term support. FreeRTOS for legacy stacks and where Amazon FreeRTOS / AWS IoT integration is required. Embedded Linux via Yocto (or Buildroot for smaller systems) when you have an application processor (Cortex-A / RISC-V), ≥64 MB RAM, need a full network stack, container runtime, or third-party libraries that assume POSIX.

Both, with strong preference for the latter as a starting point. We start from the silicon vendor's reference Yocto layer (meta-st-stm32mp, meta-ti, meta-imx, meta-nxp, meta-raspberrypi, meta-rockchip, etc.) and build a custom meta-layer for your product. Recipes are version-pinned to a Yocto LTS release (Kirkstone / Scarthgap), bitbake builds run reproducibly in CI (GitLab or GitHub Actions with sstate caching on S3 — without sstate caching a clean Yocto build is 90 minutes of pure CI cost). We deliver a SDK so your application team can cross-compile without touching the BSP, and we maintain the layer as part of the engagement.

MISRA C:2012 (with Amendment 3 directives) is our default static-analysis baseline on every embedded engagement — enforced via PC-lint Plus, Cppcheck Premium, or Coverity in CI with deviations documented and reviewed. For medical devices we deliver against IEC 62304 (software lifecycle for medical device software) with full traceability from requirements through design, code and unit/integration tests in DOORS or Polarion; we have shipped Class B and supported Class C audits. For automotive we work to ISO 26262 ASIL-B and contribute to ASIL-D safety cases under a functional safety manager. For industrial we handle IEC 61508 SIL-2. We do not self-certify — independent assessor sign-off is your audit body, we prepare the evidence.

OTA is designed before silicon is chosen — late-stage OTA retrofits are how fleets get bricked. Embedded Linux uses A/B partitioning (RAUC, Mender, or SWUpdate) with atomic rollback on boot failure, signed update bundles (typically ed25519 or ECDSA P-256), and a delta-update mechanism for cellular-constrained devices. RTOS devices use MCUboot for secondary-slot updates with image signing and anti-rollback counters. Backend is your own or hyperscale IoT (AWS IoT Device Management, Azure Device Update for IoT Hub, Mender server). We design the staged rollout policy (canary → 1% → 10% → 100%) and the field-failure recovery path before first production unit ships.

BLE 5.x via Zephyr's stack on Nordic nRF52/nRF53/nRF54 and Silicon Labs EFR32, or SoftDevice when vendor-specific certifications require it. Matter (formerly Project CHIP) via the official open-source Matter SDK on Thread (OpenThread) or Wi-Fi transport — we have shipped commissioned Matter-over-Thread devices through CSA certification. LoRaWAN via the Semtech LoRaMAC-node stack on STM32WL or SX126x companion chips, with TTN / ChirpStack backends. Sub-GHz proprietary protocols (Wi-SUN, Z-Wave) where the use case justifies the BOM cost. We do regulatory pre-scan (FCC Part 15, CE RED, MIC) before tape-out and coordinate full lab certification with a partner (TÜV, Element, Eurofins).

Dedicated embedded pod starts at 12,000 EUR/month — typical composition is TPM + senior firmware engineer + Yocto/BSP engineer, scaling up to add bootloader/security specialist, hardware EE liaison, and QA automation engineer with HIL (hardware-in-the-loop) test rig experience. For greenfield silicon-selection + architecture sprint we deliver fixed-fee from 35,000 EUR over 6–8 weeks: silicon shortlist with BOM cost and power budgets, RTOS-vs-Linux decision, OTA architecture, security threat model (SBOM + Cyber Resilience Act readiness), and prototype on a vendor dev board. Production hand-off includes manufacturing test fixtures, Yocto SDK, and CI release pipeline. Long-term sustaining engineering retainer from 6,500 EUR/month.