Going West: How We Develop and Maintain a Zephyr-based Microcontroller SDK
summary
Nordic builds a unified Zephyr-based SDK called NCS (nRF Connect SDK) that replaces per-technology zip SDKs with GitHub manifests and a West manifest + Zephyr modules workflow; tooling changes include moving Make to CMake, standardizing Kconfig and device tree, and adding logging Bluetooth controller USB and networking subsystems. A 12‑engineer coordination team synchronizes forks, runs a rebase-before-release workflow, and supports dual‑ and multi‑core nRF chips — most chips end up upstream and the system scales in production.
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chapters (22)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:18About me
- 1:34About Nordic
- 3:06Nordic ICs today
- 4:38Nordic ICs in the wild
- 7:42Nordic SoC evolution (III)
- 8:59The software story
- 10:52The problem with the SDK(s)
- 14:21Looking for solutions
- 15:53Open Source RTOS
- 17:24Risks assessed
- 18:06nRF Connect SDK (NCS)
- 18:53Bare metal to RTOS
- 19:36Single codebase
- 21:49Development model
- 23:01NCS in a nutshell
- 24:00NCS components
- 25:05Some terminology
- 26:37Keeping the fork clean
- 29:20Zephyr modules
- 30:30Repository structure
- 32:57Synchronization (upmerges)
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25mChallenging Hardware Contests With Zephyr and Lessons Learned
49mOne Code Base, Multiple Targets