5 Ways Virtualization Helps You Keep Your Embedded Tech Competitive

The automotive industry has already embraced virtualization in digital cockpit designs and driver assistance modules. The massive cloud computing market emerged due to the potential found in virtualization technology. However, the traditional embedded markets of industrial control and medical devices have been more cautious, and rightly so.

It is not until recently that embedded hypervisors have become available that can blend the features of Android and Linux with the realtime and safety requirements of legacy control environments. These new hypervisors are designed to grow with your product innovation, letting you add features more quickly and meet shrinking production timelines, making them a viable solution for the long-term support of the factory floor and hospital room. The trend is clear. The number of hypervisors used in embedded devices is expected to grow by 10% year after year and exceed 200 million dollars of annual investment by 2022.

This webinar will explore the landscape of virtualization techniques now being applied to embedded device development. Hypervisors will lead the conversation, but we will also discuss containers (Docker™), Windows™ virtualization and separation kernels. The QNX Hypervisor for Safety and the Xen hypervisor will be used as our example references.

After a brief discussion of the virtualization landscape and hypervisor designs, we will highlight five ways that virtualization keeps your embedded tech competitive:

• Move to new hardware without disrupting existing environments
• Reduce costs by sharing devices between operating environments (displays, storage, networks etc.)
• Maintain fast boot time, realtime response and deterministic behavior while co-existing with new operating system environments
• Innovate with advanced features of Android and Linux
• Support all the above while preserving safety and security