Microsoft has officially confirmed that Azure Sphere, which started off as a Microsoft Research project, will be generally available starting next year.
February 2020, rather.
This, the software titan confirmed yesterday at the IoT Solutions World Congress.
Codenamed Project Sopris, it is a Linux-based operating system that the company has created microcontroller-powered devices. The Azure Sphere microcontroller (MCU) also comes with an associated cloud security service.
Redmond has been working on this solution for a couple of years, at least.
As noted, Project Sopris was all about securing low-cost Internet-connected devices, by creating a highly secure microcontroller. This project morphed into Azure Sphere, which the software giant officially announced back in April 2018.
The MediaTek MT3620 was the first Azure Sphere chip, and it included an onboard security subsystem.
Microsoft released its software development kit preview for Visual Studio for Azure Sphere in September 2018, and has promised an SDK for Linux and support for Visual Studio Code sometime soon.
The company has also introduced new branding today for the ThreadX RTOS technology that it acquired when it bought Express Logic in April 2019. Going forward, Microsoft says, this product will be known as Azure RTOS.
ThreadX is one of the most-deployed real-time OS in the world. Renesas, a major microcontroller manufacturer, also announced that Azure RTOS will be broadly available across its products, which includes the Synergy and RA MCU families.
Azure RTOS is designed to be complementary with Azure Sphere.
