Microsoft has announced it has acquired Express Logic, a company in real time operating systems (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge devices powered by microcontroller units (MCUs).
Microsoft made the announcement on its official blog. Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS has over 6.2 billion deployments, making it one of the most deployed RTOS in the world per VDC Research.
Microsoft pointed out that manufacturers building products across a range of categories – from low capacity sensors like lightbulbs and temperature gauges to air conditioners, medical devices, and network appliances – leveraged the size, safety and security benefits of Express Logic solutions to achieve faster time to market. Even highly constrained devices (battery powered and having less than 64KB of flash memory) can use Express Logic solutions. Over 9 billion of these MCU-powered devices are built and deployed globally every year, many of which can benefit from Express Logic solutions.
So, what’s in for Microsoft? With this acquisition, it will now have access to billions of new connected endpoints, grow the number of devices that can seamlessly connect to Azure and enable new intelligent capabilities.
Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS now joins Microsoft’s growing support for IoT devices and is complementary with Azure Sphere, its security offering in the microcontroller space.
Image Credit: Microsoft