Over the last decade, embedded technology has advanced and evolved, almost beyond recognition. Where devices once stood alone and offered point functionality, today they are highly connected, extensible platforms.

Microkernels have been receiving new attention during the recent years. After being discarded in the mid 1990s on the grounds of causing too much performance impact, the approach seems to be the answer to today’s computer problems: Today, computers generally do not suffer from lack of performance, but they often have severe reliability problems.

Paravirtualization is the most common and widely used approach in the embedded industry. Paravirtualization requires a slight adaptation of the hosted environment to run on the virtualization layer, often refered to as hypervisor.

Embedded applications present a range of requirements for performance, including real-time responsiveness. Intelligent devices may need to respond to external and internal events or generate their own time-based output to meet "hard" deadlines or merely to be "fast enough".

Today, Java is the common language for desktop and server application developments. With the emerging Real-time Java technology, Java is now enabled to make its way into the embedded market.

An introduction in facing complexity and criticality challenges of todays safety-critical systems

An introduction how modern scheduling methodologies optimize performance and security of embedded systems

An introduction how SYSGO had to reinvent the Microkernel concept to meet RTOS requirements