Zephyr RTOS Hits 10-Year Mark, Welcomes Siemens and Canonical

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – September 03, 2026 – The Zephyr® Project, the open-source real-time operating system (RTOS) hosted by the Linux Foundation, today announced a significant expansion of its ecosystem, welcoming seven new Silver members as it celebrates its 10th anniversary. The new additions—including industrial giant Siemens, cloud and IoT leader Canonical, and aerospace innovator Space Cubics—signal the project's growing influence across critical technology sectors. GigaDevice, Morse Micro, Northern.tech, and Dojo Five also join the consortium, bringing deep expertise that spans the entire embedded product lifecycle.

This milestone underscores a decade of collaborative development that has positioned Zephyr as a secure, vendor-neutral foundation for the next generation of resource-constrained connected devices. The project will celebrate its growth and honor key contributors at the upcoming Zephyr Developer Summit in Prague this October, an event that will also feature the inaugural Zephyr Community Awards.

A Decade of Open-Source Growth in Embedded Systems

Over the last ten years, Zephyr has evolved from a nascent open-source initiative into a production-grade, foundational technology for the embedded systems industry. Its vendor-neutral governance under the Linux Foundation has fostered a collaborative environment, attracting contributions from a diverse community of developers and corporations. This model has proven to be a powerful alternative to proprietary RTOS solutions or fragmented, single-vendor open-source projects, which often lead to ecosystem lock-in.

Recent industry data validates this trajectory. A March 2026 report from Linux Foundation Research revealed that 70% of surveyed organizations in North America and 62% in Europe already use Zephyr in commercial products. Furthermore, 69% of all respondents plan to increase their adoption, signaling deep and growing confidence in the platform's maturity and long-term viability. This trust is critical for industries where product lifecycles can span a decade or more.

"Over the last decade, Zephyr has evolved to become a foundational technology that companies are depending on for the long term," said Kate Stewart, vice president of dependable embedded systems at the Linux Foundation. "New members bring investment and expertise, developers bring the experience of building real products and our maintainers turn that collaboration into technology the entire ecosystem uses. That's what has made the project successful, and what will carry it through years to come."

Zephyr's success is built on its core principles of scalability, security, and portability. Its modular architecture allows it to run on devices with kilobytes of memory, while its robust security features, including memory isolation and secure boot, have earned it CVE Numbering Authority status, a testament to its mature approach to vulnerability management.

A Strategic Alliance for a Vendor-Neutral Future

The addition of seven new Silver members is not just a testament to Zephyr's past success but a strategic investment in its future. Each company brings a unique set of skills and market focus, reinforcing Zephyr's role as a unifying platform across disparate industries.

Siemens, a global leader in industrial automation, joins to leverage the RTOS for its industry-grade products. "Siemens is proud to join the Zephyr Project, strengthening our clear commitment to the open-source community," said Dominik Tacke, Principal Key Expert at Siemens. "By actively contributing to this vibrant ecosystem, we aim to accelerate digital transformation, ensuring our embedded solutions meet the highest standards of reliability, security and open innovation for our customers worldwide."

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is investing in Zephyr as a foundational layer for the Internet of Things. "Zephyr represents the kind of open, vendor-neutral collaboration the embedded industry needs as devices get smaller and more connected," stated Jonathan Beri, Head of Product, IoT at Canonical. "Joining the Zephyr Project formalizes our conviction that a strong, open RTOS deserves direct investment."

Pushing the boundaries of terrestrial applications, Space Cubics will contribute its expertise in radiation-tolerant computing for space missions. "Zephyr provides the open, vendor-neutral foundation we need to meet these requirements without tying our software to a single hardware platform," explained Yasushi Shoji, Co-founder and CEO of Space Cubics, Inc. The company plans to help make open-source software a practical foundation for missions on the Moon and beyond.

Other new members round out the ecosystem's capabilities:
* GigaDevice aims to streamline the development experience by improving native Zephyr support across its GD32 MCU product line.
* Morse Micro will integrate its long-range, low-power Wi-Fi HaLow technology, which is highly complementary to Zephyr's design philosophy.
* Northern.tech, the company behind the Mender over-the-air (OTA) update manager, will contribute its expertise in maintaining the reliability and security of connected devices throughout their lifecycle.
* Dojo Five brings practical experience in modernizing embedded development, focusing on firmware architecture, security, and testing to help teams build and deploy production-ready systems.

From Industrial Automation to Deep Space: Zephyr's Real-World Impact

Zephyr's flexible architecture and broad hardware support—now spanning over 600 boards and multiple architectures like Arm, RISC-V, and x86—have enabled its adoption in a wide array of real-world applications. Its technical strengths directly address the core challenges of building secure, reliable, and power-efficient connected devices.

In industrial settings, Zephyr's real-time capabilities are critical for process controllers, factory automation systems, and robotics. The involvement of Siemens is expected to deepen its footprint in this sector. In healthcare, it powers devices like the DandelionMD PulseTape ECG, where reliability and timely data processing are paramount. Even in deep space, the RTOS has flight heritage, with the Aethero NxN Edge Computing Module using Zephyr to control its payload in orbit.

This broad applicability is a direct result of its design. The use of modern development tools like Devicetree and Kconfig, familiar to Linux developers, lowers the barrier to entry for software engineers moving into the embedded space. This approach allows developers to focus on application logic rather than low-level hardware configuration, accelerating innovation and promoting hardware portability.

Celebrating a Milestone and Charting the Future

To commemorate its tenth year, the project is introducing the Zephyr Community Awards, or "Zephies," to honor the developers, maintainers, and advocates whose contributions have been instrumental to its success. The winners will be announced at the Zephyr Developer Summit, which runs from October 7-9 in Prague alongside the Open Source Summit Europe. The event will also host a dedicated Maintainers Forum, providing a venue for key technical leaders to collaborate on the project's future priorities.

The project is well-positioned to tackle emerging technology trends, including the rise of Edge AI and the need for sophisticated multi-OS environments in complex systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). Its secure, modular, and vendor-neutral foundation provides the stability required for these next-generation applications. As the industry gathers in Prague, the focus will be not only on celebrating a decade of achievement but on charting the course for the next ten years of open-source innovation in embedded systems.