Red Bend’s vRapid Mobile® Fuse™ Now Updates the “Internet of Small Things” in Automotive, Mobile and M2M

Red Bend’s vRapid Mobile® Fuse™ Now Updates the “Internet of Small Things” in Automotive, Mobile and M2M

With Red Bend’s new Fuse update product, even the smallest resource-constrained electronic devices can receive firmware updates over-the-air.

Red Bend Software, the leader in Mobile Software Management (MSM) with more than 1.75 billion Red Bend-Enabled™ devices, today announced the addition of Fuse™ to its vRapid Mobile® firmware over-the-air (FOTA) product suite. With the new vRapid Mobile Fuse (Firmware Updating for Small Electronics), manufacturers can now remotely update embedded devices in resource-constrained environments—such as tiny automotive ECUs—in half the time, providing significant savings in manufacturer warranty costs and maintenance. Also today, Red Bend announced immediate support for vRapid Mobile Fuse on the Freescale® Qorivva® MPC560xB/C/D family of 32-bit MCU integrated devices for automotive body electronics applications.

Adopted by more than 80 leading device manufacturers, mobile operators, semiconductor vendors and automotive OEMs worldwide, Red Bend’s vRapid Mobile provides the easiest, fastest and most reliable way to deliver new features, applications and operating system updates to remote devices. As more and more resource-constrained devices become wirelessly connected, Fuse has been added to the vRapid Mobile product suite to specifically manage software across the “Internet of Small Things” such as automotive electronic control units (ECUs), embedded modules and machine-to-machine (M2M) devices used in utilities, manufacturing and logistics. These environments are characterized by limited bandwidth to distribute updates, insufficient flash resources to integrate a regular firmware update installer and not enough RAM to store the software update package. Consequently, such devices either could not be remotely updated, or the process to perform updates was time consuming, error prone and expensive.

Red Bend’s innovative vRapid Mobile Fuse works differently by:

  • Using a new small update installer that requires as little as 7KB of working memory
  • Dividing the update package into small, streamable files capable of distribution over networks with extremely limited bandwidth
  • Simultaneously performing updates as the streamed files are received in the device, requiring fewer system resources to store an update package

As a result, Fuse updates resource-constrained devices such as automotive ECUs over-the-air or over the CAN bus in half-the-time as traditional methods performed inside the dealership.

“Today’s automotive vehicles can contain more than 100 ECUs that are responsible for the car’s operation, from controlling the engine to managing the air conditioning. Finding a cost-effective way to maintain the increasing amount of software inside cars is a growing challenge for automotive OEMs and tier one suppliers,” said Roger Lanctot, associate director of the global automotive practice at Strategy Analytics.

“Solutions like Red Bend’s new vRapid Mobile Fuse can eliminate a manufacturer’s dependency on dealers to perform routine software maintenance, and ultimately save manufacturers and consumers both time and money.”

vRapid Mobile Fuse is architecture independent and supports any hardware platform, including the Freescale Qorivva MPC560xB/C/D family of 32-bit MCU integrated devices for automotive body electronics applications.
“Red Bend’s support for the Freescale Qorivva product family will enable our automotive customers to more effectively manage software,” said Brent Henson, global systems and applications manager, automotive microcontrollers for Freescale Semiconductor, a leader in embedded processing solutions for the automotive, consumer, industrial and networking markets.

“Our desire is to help make vehicles safer, more efficient and an extension of the owner’s personal lifestyle, and partnering with Red Bend to enable software updates to every vehicle component is an important step towards achieving this goal.”

Yoram Salinger, CEO of Red Bend Software, said:
“With the introduction of vRapid Mobile Fuse, Red Bend is once again demonstrating its leadership in managing any type of software on any type of device. When we first introduced our FOTA capability to the car industry in 2008, we made it possible for OEMs to avoid costly product recalls, and now today receiving software updates OTA is a must-have feature in any future car. Five years later in 2013, Red Bend is changing the paradigm again by enabling OEMs to remotely update virtually every electronic component inside the vehicle, even the smallest ECU, leading the way for every connected car to become software-managed like other consumer electronics devices.”

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