2018 marks FreeRTOS’s 15th anniversary, and 11 years of continued SAFERTOS support. SAFERTOS is the safety critical upgrade for FreeRTOS, and now has more safety critical features than ever. SAFERTOS continues to support FreeRTOS into the future. Download fully functional demos of SAFERTOS, and a manual detailing how to upgrade from FreeRTOS to SAFERTOS from the WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems (WHIS) website www.highintegritysystems.com.

FreeRTOS™ is a market leading Real Time Operating System, or RTOS, created by Richard Barry of Real Time Engineers Ltd, and more recently stewarded by Amazon Web Services (AWS). FreeRTOS supports more than 35 architectures and was downloaded once every 3 minutes during 2017. It is professionally developed, strictly quality controlled, robust, supported, and free to embed in commercial products. Created by Richard Barry in 2003, this year marks the 15th anniversary of FreeRTOS, its popularity as great as it’s ever been.

SAFERTOS® is a pre-certified, pre-emptive, safety critical Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) based on the functional model of the FreeRTOS kernel. SAFERTOS delivers determinism and robustness to embedded systems, whilst using minimum resources. Due to the shared functional model SAFERTOS is simple to use, but it has been completely redesigned by our team of safety experts. WHIS engineers took the FreeRTOS kernel functional model, subjected it to a full HAZOP, identified all areas of weakness with respect to safety within the functional model and API, and generated a set of safety requirements. The resulting functional and safety requirements sets were put through an IEC 61508-3 SIL 3 development life cycle, the highest possible for a software only component, creating the SAFERTOS code base and DAP.

To upgrade from FreeRTOS to SAFERTOS is straightforward. Many developers prototype using the FreeRTOS kernel, and convert to SAFERTOS at the start of their formal development phase. WHIS engineers have created a manual that contains step by step instructions on how to upgrade, which is freely available as part of the free SAFERTOS download package from www.highintegritysystems.com.

“We’ve enjoyed working with Richard Barry over the years, and SAFERTOS is the ideal solution for FreeRTOS developers that are looking to develop for safety critical devices” Says Andrew Longhurst, Business Development Manager from WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems, “Congratulations to FreeRTOS on reaching 15 years, we look forward to continuing to support FreeRTOS developers with SAFERTOS”

Free, fully functional binary demos of SAFERTOS, along with a manual detailing how to upgrade from FreeRTOS to SAFERTOS, are available at https://www.highintegritysystems.com/safertos

WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems is a safety systems company that produces and supplies real time operating systems and platform solutions to the Medical, Automotive and Industrial sectors. For more information, please visit https://www.highintegritysystems.com.