The Biggest Takeaways from Embedded World 2025

Last week, embedded developers, managers, and vendors descended upon Nuremberg, Germany, for the annual Embedded World trade show. Despite a German Airline workers strike that wreaked havoc on travel plans, Embedded World was the place to catch up on embedded systems’ latest and future trends. 

In this post, I’ll share some of the trends and observations I made while attending the conference and some cool things I saw that excite me.

Take-a-way #1 – Commercial Integration with Modern Workflows

Embedded developers have long struggled to balance modern software development practices with the constraints of embedded systems. While industries like web and enterprise software have seamlessly adopted Test-Driven Development (TDD), DevSecOps, and CI/CD, the embedded world has been slower to follow suit. 

The challenge? The tools we use often don’t integrate well with modern workflows, especially when mixing open-source software with commercial toolchains.

That’s starting to change.

At Embedded World 2025, I saw a clear trend: commercial embedded tool providers are adapting to modern development workflows. A prime example is IAR, which is making a big push to integrate with Zephyr RTOS and DevSecOps pipelines.

One of the biggest pain points in embedded development has been compiler and debugging tool integration. Open-source compilers like GCC and Clang have their strengths, but sometimes, commercial compilers like IAR Embedded Workbench can deliver better performance, stricter compliance with safety standards, and improved power optimization. 

The problem? Toolchains have often been restricted to standalone environments, making it difficult to integrate with cloud technologies and DevOps. 

At the IAR booth, they demonstrated:

• DevSecOps-friendly integration, allowing safety-critical systems to run static analysis, compliance checks, and automated security scanning as part of CI/CD workflows.
• Improved debugging support, reducing the time engineers spend troubleshooting complex embedded applications.
• A new, cloud-enabled platform that seamlessly integrates with GitHub and Kubernetes. Allowing code to be compiled and tested in the cloud as part of a CI/CD pipeline. 

On top of that, I saw seamless Zephyr RTOS compilation with IAR, eliminating the friction of using commercial tools with open-source frameworks. Now if you need to squeeze more out of the RTOS and application, you can compile with IAR and get 20 – 40% more out of your CPU!

My key takeaway is that commercial tools are no longer an obstacle to modern development—they are evolving to fit into today’s workflows.
For teams working on safety-critical systems, performance-optimized applications, or regulated industries, this means they no longer have to choose between using modern workflows and commercial toolchains—they can finally have both!

Take-a-way #2 – Zephyr will Dominate the Industry

For the past few years, the Linux Foundation’s Zephyr Project has been a curiosity. It is an open-source RTOS targeting IoT applications that need safety and security. The question that I always asked was, “Why do we need yet another RTOS?”

After all, we have FreeRTOS, ThreadX, NuttX, and dozens of others. Yet, as each open-source project was bought by some big tech company, it became clear that the only open-source RTOS we could trust to be stable was Zephyr. The Linux Foundation’s track record with Linux showed us what Zephyr could become. 

It wasn’t an overnight success. Nothing ever is, despite what marketing might tell you. But as I walked around the show floor and talked to vendors and engineers, one thing became clear. Zephyr is going to dominate the industry. One might argue that it already is. We just haven’t realized it or maybe have resisted. 

If you look at the data, Zephyr has more contributors than any other open-source RTOS (See Figure 1). In fact, Zephyr 4.1 had more than 700 individual developers who contributed to the release! 

Figure 1 – Over the past 8 years, contributors have more than 5x!

Is Zephyr perfect? No. Last year, in my RTOS Performance Report, I pointed out that Zephyr wasn’t living up to the hype when it came to run-time performance. Did it ruffle their feathers? Absolutely! Did they complain and make excuses? No!

Instead, they made it a priority to improve the performance of the kernel! 

Zephyr 4.1 was released, featuring:

• Built-in thread metrics for benchmarking Zephyr
• 20% faster cooperative scheduling
• 46% faster preemptive scheduling
• 35% faster synchronization
• 24% faster message processing
• New support for compiling Zephyr with IAR

Not only are bright and brilliant developers contributing to the project, but they’re listening and doing everything they can to make Zephyr the best RTOS in its class.

Zephyr RTOS is going to take over the world! 

Take-a-way #3 – AI Everywhere

Just about every company at Embedded World was touting their use of Artificial Intelligence. Anyone who doubts that AI is a game changer is going to be in for a rude awakening. While the technology might not be perfect today, you are going to see exponential improvements over the next few years that will likely be staggering. 

For example, there was a company there named Circuit Mind whose tools aims to take a system architecture to schematic in 60 seconds. As much fun as schematics are, could you imagine if you could design your system architecture and then let AI convert that into functional schematics? Sure, you need to review and all that Jazz, but how much faster could you get things done?

Figure 2 – AI finding it’s way into all aspects of electronic system design

Another example was a company named Code Intelligence that demonstrated AI-Automated Fuzz Testing. Embedded developers have traditionally been bad at security and testing. What if you could just outsource that to an AI tool that could ensure your software is secure and tested? 

My favorite demonstration was found at the ST Microelectronics booth. It was an AI system that could play fooseball! As it turned out, it was quite challenging to play against!

Fgiure 3 – An AI fooseball table that can put human players to shame

I know it might sound like the future, but I’ve just learned that the new Kroger coming into town will have “robot stock people.” So, while you may be skeptical of AI, it’s coming to an edge near you!

Take-a-way #4 – Growing Support for Multicore

Multicore processing in embedded systems is no longer a niche feature—it’s becoming a necessity. As the demand for more processing power, real-time performance, and AI acceleration grows, embedded hardware vendors are doubling down on multicore architectures. At Embedded World 2025, this trend was impossible to ignore.

First, multicore tracing was clearly demonstrated. For example, Segger announced that SystemView has been expanded to support multicore tracing. One of the biggest challenges in multicore systems is debugging and performance optimization. Segger has been a staple in the embedded industry for real-time tracing and profiling, and this year, their SystemView tool expanded support for multicore applications.

At their booth, Segger engineers demonstrated how SystemView can now:

• Capture and analyze real-time execution across multiple cores, showing how tasks are scheduled and interact across CPUs.
• Visualize thread interactions in RTOS-based systems running on heterogeneous architectures.
• Profile power consumption and execution timing, giving developers insight into optimizing both performance and efficiency.

Having the right tools to debug and visualize your code is certainly important, but so is the silicon that your application is running on. Multicore isn’t just about performance—it’s about enabling new capabilities like AI, security isolation, and real-time responsiveness. 

At the conference, several chip vendors showcased their latest multicore processors, including parts featuring dedicated Neural Processing Units (NPUs) to accelerate machine learning workloads at the edge.

For example, STM32N6 has a 1 GHz NPU that provides 600 GOPS of AI computational power! That allows you to run Multi-Object Detection Models like YOLO onboard at 30+ FPS, perform H.264 encoding, and more! 

Another interesting chip in this area was the Alif Ensemble E3. This chip not only has dual-core Cortex-M55s, but also a dual Ethous-U55 NPU. 

Figure 4 – Alif Semiconductors E Series Microcontrollers

This aligns with a broader industry push toward heterogeneous multicore architectures, where different cores specialize in different tasks—such as an RTOS-controlled core for real-time tasks, a Linux core for system management, and an NPU for AI acceleration.

As more vendors embrace multicore designs, the challenge shifts from hardware availability to software enablement. The good news? RTOSes like Zephyr and FreeRTOS are adapting to multicore, and development tools are catching up.

If you’re still designing single-core embedded applications, now might be the time to consider how multicore could improve your next-generation product.

Take-a-way #5 – DevOps becoming Mainstream

For years, embedded software teams have been reluctant to embrace DevOps, often citing concerns over real-time constraints, hardware dependencies, and the belief that embedded systems development fundamentally differs from cloud and enterprise software. But at Embedded World 2025, it was clear that those barriers were fading.

One of the most prominent themes at the conference was the shift toward DevSecOps, which integrates security into development pipelines. The embedded industry is finally catching up with modern software practices, and organizations that fail to adopt DevOps risk being left behind.

One of the most compelling examples of this transformation is the integration of CodeSecure into GitLab pipelines for ISO 26262 compliance. Traditionally, achieving functional safety and security in automotive, medical, and industrial applications has been a slow, manual process. But by embedding formal verification, static analysis, and vulnerability detection directly into CI/CD pipelines, companies can now automate compliance checks as part of their daily development cycle.

At the Gitlab booth, engineers demonstrated how their GitLab integration enables teams to:

• Perform automated MISRA checks as part of every commit, ensuring adherence to automotive coding standards.
• Verify functional safety requirements early in the cycle, preventing late-stage surprises that could derail certification efforts.
• Scan for security vulnerabilities in firmware and bootloaders, making DevSecOps a reality for safety-critical embedded systems.

What’s most striking is how mainstream DevOps tools are adapting to embedded workflows. They’re paying attention to how we develop products and working to ensure we have the tools and workflows needed to be successful. 

Several vendors showcased automated hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing running in CI/CD, allowing firmware to be validated across multiple hardware configurations before engineers ever flash a physical device. This is a game-changer, especially for teams working on multicore, safety-critical, and AI-enabled embedded systems.

The message from Embedded World 2025 was clear:

• Security and compliance are no longer optional
• Security and compliance must be automated.
• Embedded software is finally joining the modern development world.

DevOps is no longer just a buzzword in embedded—it’s becoming the standard.

If you are interested in diving a bit deeper, Darwin Sanoy put together a great series of tutorials that you can find at https://gitlab.com/guided-explorations/embedded/workshops/embedded-devops-workshop-refactoring-to-ci/-/blob/main/README.md?ref_type=heads

The Bottom Line

If Embedded World 2025 made anything clear, it’s this: Embedded software development is undergoing a fundamental shift.

• Commercial tools like those provided by IAR are starting to support open-source initiatives within the industry, allowing us to balance the best of both worlds.
• Zephyr is taking over. It’s no longer just another RTOS; it’s becoming the RTOS.
• AI is becoming embedded. Whether it’s hardware acceleration, automated testing, or design automation, AI is here to stay.
• Multicore is the new normal. From NPUs to real-time scheduling, embedded systems are moving beyond single-core designs.
• DevOps is now mainstream. The days of embedded software teams resisting CI/CD, security automation, and cloud-based workflows are over.

If you’re still building firmware like you did five years ago, it’s time to take a hard look at how modern embedded development is evolving. The tools are there. The industry is moving forward. The only question is: Are you?