eSOL licences SEGGER emCompress for automotive firmware updates

Japanese embedded engineering supplier eSOL has licensed SEGGER’s emCompress compression software to enable faster firmware updates in Electronic Control Units (ECUs) for automotive customers.

emCompress is able to drastically reduce update times by offering solutions to compress data for all kinds of applications where size matters. Designed for embedded systems, emCompress can compress and decompress data even on the smallest microcontrollers.

In the automotive industry, slow bus systems like CAN (Controller Area Network) are a common standard. To address the speed limitations imposed by the communication bus, the best option is usually to reduce the amount of data to be transferred. As the information in a firmware update needs to stay complete, compression has become the logical choice.

emCompress supports the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) to perform lossless data compression as well as other algorithms (e.g. LZMA2). Typical compression rates for firmware images range from 2 to 4, reducing the update time between 50 and 75 percent. The decompression algorithm also supports files that were created by PC-based tools such as “7-ZIP” or “Lzip” which use LZMA as well.

“Thanks to the highly effective implementation of the state-of-the-art compression algorithms in SEGGER’s emCompress, we can significantly speed up ECU firmware updates,” said Bob N. Ueyama, Executive Vice President of eSOL.

The emCompress software is written in well-commented ANSI C and is both compiler and target independent. emCompress is not covered by an open-source or required-attribution license and can be integrated into any commercial or proprietary product, without the obligation to attribute the vendor or disclose the combined source.