Medical device manufacturers are under pressure to accelerate time-tomarket for their next-generation devices as they pursue global outreach efforts, particularly in China, Japan, and Europe. This challenge includes finding ways to minimize the time and cost to certify systems and satisfy regulatory safety and security requirements. Regulatory agencies are requiring higher levels of security and faster update processes to quickly resolve safety and security issues to ensure continuing patient safety.

On the application side, emerging medical devices require real-time and deterministic performance—for example, a surgical robot must restrict where cuts are made based on pre-operation programming by the surgeon. The trend for such medical applications is for next-generation device designs to be more software focused than hardware focused, which requires providing software developers with modern software programming methods and tools. There is also fierce competition for talented software developers who want to apply the latest techniques they learned in school and not be forced to use outdated software environments.

To help device manufacturers address these challenges, Wind River® invests heavily in its VxWorks® real-time operating system (RTOS), adding new features and maintaining its very high level of security, safety, and reliability. VxWorks delivers hard real-time performance, determinism, and low latency, along with the scalability required for medical applications. It is the world’s most widely used commercial RTOS, with more than 30 years in the field and billions of deployments.