Overview
Migrations are the work everyone puts off. A vendor reshuffles a product line, an RTOS hits end-of-life, a part climbs to a 52-week lead time, or a new chip shows up that's 30% cheaper at scale. The technical answer is always the same, “port the firmware,” and the team's answer is usually “next quarter,” quarter after quarter. Embedder shrinks the port down to something a team will actually sit down and do.
The migration tax
A port is high-risk and wins you no applause. Pull off a clean one and the prize is the same product running on a different chip, which not one customer will ever notice. Botch it and you're left with a board that won't boot, or worse, a regression that surfaces only out in the field. So teams wait until there's no choice left, which tends to be the worst possible moment to start.
What the agent does
On the source side it reads your existing firmware along with the reference manual, errata, schematic, and whatever HAL conventions the codebase follows. On the target side it reads the new chip's reference manual, its SVD device file, and the new board's schematic. Then it lines up the peripherals across both parts, pairing each UART, I²C bus, and timer with its counterpart, and proposes a port that keeps behavior intact while translating to the new HAL, RTOS primitives, or language.
Each translated module comes back with the new code and a cited explanation of what changed and why. Where Hardware Interaction is wired up, you also get a HIL test that runs the migrated path on real silicon, including bus-level verification that the same waveform lands on the same pin on the new part.
Diff-driven migration
What lands is a pull request, or a string of them, reviewed like any other change your team ships. There's no black-box regeneration of the codebase here. Every edit is auditable and commit-by-commit, with the agent's reasoning attached, so your engineers stay on top of every decision that actually matters.
Common patterns
- Cross-vendor swap. Moving firmware from one silicon vendor's family to another's while preserving behavior.
- HAL evolution. Migrating across HAL generations, from a vendor HAL to a custom one, or from bare-metal to a vendor HAL.
- RTOS port. FreeRTOS to Zephyr, ThreadX to FreeRTOS, bare-metal to RTOS, with native FreeRTOS and Zephyr support on the target side.
- Language port. C to Rust for safety-critical paths moving off raw C.
- Vendor IP port. Porting a vendor's reference code and IP between members of the same MCU family.
Vendor coverage
The catalog spans 500+ MCUs and 3,000+ peripherals across STM32, NXP, ESP32, Infineon, Nordic, and TI. When both sides of your port already live in the catalog, the reference manuals and SVD files are indexed and ready to query. When one side doesn't, the custom upload flow pulls the new part into scope.
Who it's for
- Teams facing EOL or supply-driven chip changes.
- Companies switching vendors for cost, supply, or capability reasons.
- Programs modernizing to a new RTOS across multiple product lines.
- Safety-critical teams moving from C to Rust on hot paths.
Getting started
Quickest path is a scoping call: we look at the source and target hardware together and size the work honestly. Book a call.