[2] It has formulated and defined Industrial TRON (ITRON) specification for an embedded real-time OS (RTOS) kernel.
Originally undertaken in 1984, ITRON is a Japanese open standard for a real-time operating system initiated under the guidance of Ken Sakamura.
The ITRON RTOS specification is targeted for consumer electronic devices, such as mobile phones and fax machines.
Examples of open source RTOSes incorporating an API based on μITRON specification are eCos and RTEMS.
For example, in the FY 2016 survey,[4] TRON OSs (including ITRON specification OS and T-Kernel) accounted for around 60% of the embedded systems market.
There are design wins such as Toyota PRADO (2005) which uses μITRON for its engine control system, which are listed in 30th anniversary of the TRON Project page.
[10] Note, however, during the time ITRON specification OS was distributed, TRON Project did not ask the users to mention its use in the manual or the product itself and so exact tally of the design wins does not exist at all.
μITRON is used as an OS in the invisible realm of devices such as business equipment, home appliances, and game console remote controls.
[11] In 2003, NTT DoCoMo announced that it would be recommending Symbian OS and Linux as the OSs for its 3G FOMA service.
Even after μITRON is no longer used as the main OS for mobile phones, it may still be running in microprocessrs for camera control, etc.
In multimedia devices from the 1990s to the early 2000s, in order to achieve advanced functions such as maximizing the performance of low-performance processors and controlling video processing and network communication in real time in parallel, it was necessary to use an RTOS such as ITRON.
Because ITRON specification OS is not well standardized, TRON Forum recommends T-Kernel as an RTOS for high-function embedded systems.
In embedded devices for general consumers in the early 2000s, the series of Colorio, Seiko Epson's printer, adopted "eCROS," a software platform based on T-Kernel from eSOL in 2008.
But since the first quarter of 2010, TRON Association became part of T-Engine Forum,[15] another non-profit organization that promotes other operating system such as the next generation RTOS, T-Kernel.