In order to extended the scope of its product offering and catalyse further commercial growth, specialist in observability technology for embedded and edge-based systems Percepio has confirmed Andreas Klintemyr as its new Product Lead.
Embedded engineers regularly encounter failures that are difficult to reproduce despite using the same firmware image throughout testing. A system may pass hundreds of test cycles before a watchdog reset occurs, a communication stack may hang only after many hours of operation, or a latency spike may appear intermittently and then disappear in subsequent runs. Continuous observability (CO) extends the audit trail into runtime execution. Rather than treating observability solely as a debugging technique, it becomes an ongoing capability that captures execution data throughout development, integration, testing, and validation.
Modern defence platforms increasingly gain capability through frequent software updates rather than major hardware upgrades. That shift brings speed, flexibility, and lower cost, but it also exposes a growing mismatch: capability is delivered continuously, while software assurance is still often treated as a one-time activity before deployment.
Traditional verification remains essential. Unit testing, static analysis, integration testing, and qualification provide the foundation for safe and reliable embedded systems. But they cannot fully reveal how software behaves under real operational conditions: timing pressure, task contention, hardware interactions, environmental factors, and complex integration scenarios. Some faults only emerge after deployment, triggered by rare combinations of runtime events that are difficult or impossible to reproduce in the laboratory.
In his latest video interview EPDT’s Editor-in-Chief Mike Green talks with Andreas Lifvendahl, CEO of Percepio about the emerging era of software-defined medical devices and how consistent behaviour can be maintained on an ongoing basis.
Clinical trials are an ideal opportunity not only to validate clinical outcomes but also to understand software behaviour under real operating conditions.
“Today it’s a lot of ad hoc debugging… then you remove the printf’s and alike completely, and then you’re basically flying blind from that point on. … But development never stops. We are only a small piece of a much larger puzzle—but it’s a puzzle that is rapidly growing and evolving” says Lifvendahl, CEO at Percepio.
Florent Goutailler, Associate Professor at Télécom Saint-Etienne, describes how adding a runtime visualisation tool to his FreeRTOS course closed that gap – and transformed the way his students approach engineering problems.
“For many years, I observed the same pattern: students could write code that compiled and ran, but when something didn’t behave as expected, they struggled to understand why.”
Oltre la verifica statica: l’importanza del monitoraggio runtime nei sistemi edge critici per garantire sicurezza, resilienza informatica e successo operativo attraverso l’osservabilità continua. Read (In Italian) the Elettronica Oggi article on Percepio’s Continuous Observability.
Why are non-crashing failures becoming more common in modern embedded designs?
Embedded systems have become far more complex over the last decade. We now see multicore processors, RTOS-based concurrency, third-party middleware, connectivity stacks, and increasingly AI or data-driven workloads running alongside traditional control software. Read the Component in Electronics interview with Percepio CEO Andreas Lifvendahl, March 2026 issue
“We do embedded software traces for automotive and other industrial software applications,” said Andreas Lifvendahl, CEO of Percepio. “We make sure the software behaves.” Tracealyzer provided insight into software runtime performance, helping engineers monitor execution behaviour during development and testing in BMW’s work on software-defined vehicles (SDVs). Read Vehicle Electronic’s Embedded Worlds 2026 show floor interview with Percepio CEO Andreas Lifvendahl (issue 148, April 2026)
Embedded software often also needs to meet real-time requirements. For example, a control system might have a requirement to output control signals to a motor controller every 5 milliseconds, where any additional delay is considered a failure. Such requirements are not only affected by the execution time of the specific thread, but also by dependencies on other threads. Thus, verifying real-time requirements is about more than measuring timing metrics. It is also about identifying potential risks from thread interactions that may affect the timing requirements.
So, how do you verify that a design is good from a multi-threading perspective?
Stuart Cording at Elektor Magazine interviews Percepio’s Johan Kraft at Embedded World in Nuremberg 2026. Covring topics like Tracealyzer, Percepio Detect, and RTOS runtime debugging and wider edge observability challenges. The discussion reinforces a familiar challenge in embedded development: many of the hardest bugs are not easy to reproduce in a halted debugger. Better runtime observability helps teams see what the system was actually doing, when it mattered most.
RTOS applications rarely fail because a single task is misbehaving. Instead, problems emerge from interactions that are often invisible at the code level.
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.
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