Breeze: Smart grid RTOS

Breeze is a lightweight, event-driven real-time operating system developed by Sentec, originally designed for battery-powered devices and now widely used in smart metering applications. Optimized for ultra-low power consumption, Breeze supports modular application development, simplifying testing, deployment, and maintenance. It includes a lockable metrology core to meet strict type approval requirements and offers advanced features such as privileged mode and region-based memory protection for enhanced security.

Built on a hardware abstraction layer, Breeze is compatible with a broad range of 16- and 32-bit microcontrollers, including Cortex-M3 and M0+ architectures. Its flexibility allows rapid customization to meet the unique needs of different utilities. Breeze also supports in-field firmware upgrades by updating only the modified application modules, significantly reducing network bandwidth usage. Pre-built applications, including data logging and Zigbee communication, further accelerate development. Designed with scalability and efficiency in mind, Breeze is a robust RTOS solution for next-generation smart devices.

Features & benefits 

Breeze offers the following benefits for smart metering and any other applications requiring modular upload and battery life preservation: 

• Ring fencing of certified code
• Provable cooperative multitasking 
• Certified code guaranteed to run 
• Memory model can protect against illegal accesses 
• Well defined intra application interfaces 
• Ability to add extra functionality to a deployed system 
• Unrestrictive licensing 
• Filing system with a number of different media backends
• Standard C library allows test on target or a desktop PC 
• Build on a back catalogue of existing metering applications 
• Enables 3rd party app development 
• Optional communications protocol stack add-ons
• Low power consumption for maximum battery life