In the News Archives

SDV: Was BMWs jüngste Software-Investition verrät

Mar 4, 2026

Premium car manufacturers like BMW – companies with strong internal development expertise and decades of software experience – are investing in modern development tools to manage the growing complexity of today’s vehicle architectures.

Max Maxfield – “Well, Fork Me with a Dining Philosophers Problem”

Mar 1, 2026

One question I’m often asked—and one I often ask myself—is, “How many people are currently involved in developing embedded systems?” Counting engineers is a slippery problem (especially mechanical engineers, because they are often dripping in oil). I’d hazard a guess that there are probably between 2 and 4 million embedded professionals globally (depending on how we define ‘embedded’ and ‘professionals’), including both hardware designers and software/firmware developers.

Now I have another question for you. How many embedded system development teams around the world are using the tools from Percepio? The answer to this one is easy: “Not as many as there should be!”

What BMW’s latest software investment reveals about the future of automotive development

Mar 1, 2026

The automotive industry is quietly undergoing a structural transformation that is every bit as significant as the move from carburetors to electronic fuel injection or from mechanical steering to drive-by-wire. The rise of the software-defined vehicle (SDV) is reshaping OEM business models, engineering practices, and supply chains at a speed that only a few years ago would have seemed improbable.

In this new reality, even premium manufacturers such as BMW – companies with deep in-house engineering capability and long-established software competencies – are making strategic investments in modern development tools to support increasingly complex vehicle architectures. Their recent decision to adopt Percepio’s runtime observability technology is more than a single OEM upgrading a single capability; it’s part of a broader shift that is becoming visible across the industry.

“Keeping a close watch” – Percepio founder Johan Kraft interviewed on edge observability

Feb 24, 2026

In a case highlighted by debug specialist Percepio, a company building HVAC systems found, once again, a low-importance task failing to compete as expected. Once again, a watchdog timer reset the device. Without logs of what happened, they just looked like random reboots. With data captured by the targets themselves, developers obtained the clues they needed to create a fix.

…This kind of in-field observability is clearly not new. But it is taking on greater importance thanks to the proliferation of networked devices.

Percepio Detect and Tracealyzer – A Dynamic Duo for Complex Embedded Environments

Feb 19, 2026

The world of embedded systems evolves, with devices growing ever more sophisticated and software-centric. In this new landscape, with highly interconnected environments that defy traditional testing and debugging approaches, a reactive, fire-fighting mentality is no longer sufficient. Developers need a proactive strategy to gain continuous visibility into system behaviour—a strategy known as observability-driven development (ODD).

“With Observability, Debugging Can Start Directly From Real System Data”

Feb 16, 2026

A daunting task otherwise, Percepio’s Tracealyzer and Detect are changing the game of debugging embedded systems with real-time observability and faster fault resolution. Speaking to Johan Kraft and Andreas Lifvendahl, EFY’s Nidhi Agarwal explores how these tools are transforming development workflows. The hardest parts are timing-critical embedded systems, where adding instrumentation or software tracing introduces unacceptable overhead. It becomes even more challenging in heterogeneous systems built from third-party components, where we do not have full access to source code or internal behavior.

Percepio Advances Automotive Software Observability for SDVs

Feb 10, 2026

Embedded software observability supports BMW Group in monitoring runtime performance within software-defined vehicle architectures.

In automotive electronics, particularly body, comfort and control systems, embedded software performance has become a critical engineering concern. As vehicles transition toward software-defined architectures, developers must ensure deterministic behavior, real-time responsiveness and long-term reliability across increasingly complex distributed systems.

The New Realities of Automotive Software Development

Jan 29, 2026

Longstanding engineering practices suddenly feel insufficient. Percepio’s CEO Andreas Lifvendahl writes in ADT on the disruptive pressures on automotive software engineers facing increased SDV complexity. ” As vehicle architectures shift toward high-performance compute platforms, continuous software deployment, and complex cross-domain interactions, developers are encountering problems that cannot be solved with the tools of the past. BMW’s recent decision to adopt Percepio’s observability technology is a visible example of how OEMs are modernizing their toolchains to address these new realities.”

From code to behavior – Software assurance in safety- and mission-critical edge systems

Jan 15, 2026

Percepio’s CEO Andreas Lifvendahl appears as guest blogger in Military Embedded Systems. “In today’s defense and aerospace systems, the software stack is rapidly becoming as complex and as critical as the hardware it runs on. Modern edge platforms increasingly support multithreaded real-time applications, machine learning (ML) inference, over-the-air (OTA) updates, and third-party integrations.

Consider a defense avionics application running on a partitioned embedded platform with mixed-criticality workloads. In the lab, the system passes all static checks and unit tests. However, during field trials, a subtle race condition causes periodic latency spikes in a mission-critical control loop – an issue never observed in simulation or test environments.”

From Bottlenecks To Breakthroughs

Dec 22, 2025

With the rising complexity of embedded systems and the difficulty in finding hidden bugs, observability tools seem to be the new alternative for developers. It shows what is happening in real time. What do the innovators say?

Continuous Observability in Automotive Development

Dec 8, 2025

As the automotive industry advances toward increasingly software-defined vehicles, the complexity of embedded systems is rising dramatically. From electrified powertrains to autonomous features and over-the-air updates, modern vehicles now function as distributed computing platforms with strict real-time constraints and safety-critical responsibilities.

In this landscape, ensuring software correctness, reliability, and traceability is no longer a late-stage testing concern, it must be a continuous effort. This is where the concept of continuous observability becomes essential.

BMW setzt auf Tracealyzer für SDV-Timinganalyse

Dec 1, 2025

Das Tool Tracealyzer von Percepio unterstützt BMW ab sofort dabei, die Softwareleistung in der IP-Basis-Integrationsplattform für Karosserie- und Komfortfunktionen in der nächsten Fahrzeuggeneration zu überwachen und zu optimieren.

« Older Entries