More than four billion embedded systems or devices shipped worldwide in 2006, says a report by Venture Development Corporation (VDC). The market research firm forecasts three years of growth in device shipments, especially for devices with commercial and/or open source operating systems like Windows and Linux.

According to VDC's “2007 Embedded Systems Market Statistics” report, the majority of embedded systems shipped in 2006 had either no operating system or an OS developed in-house. However, through 2009, shipments of devices with commercial or open-source OSes such as Linux or Windows will grow at a faster rate than devices with no formal OS, the firm said.

Commercial or open-source operating systems were still in the minority on embedded systems in 2006
Source: VDC
The report noted that the number of products shipping in any given year will always be heavily represented by designs from years past. Therefore, the expected migrations in operating system selection will be less visible in the short term.

Matt Volckmann, senior analyst/program manager with VDC's Embedded Software Practice, said, “Further complicating this analysis is the fact that embedded systems may contain one or more operating system environment and/or processor (either multiple processors or multi-cores on a single chip). The growing complexity per embedded system/device … will therefore also impact the opportunity per unit shipped.”

In a statement, VDC said its report also specifically addresses many other important developments and trends within the embedded systems market, and offers core statistics on the number of embedded developers and embedded development project starts. Pricing for the report was not provided.

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