The Amazon FreeRTOS Qualification Program (AFQP) is for microcontroller (MCU) vendors who want to qualify their MCU-based development board on Amazon FreeRTOS. The purpose of the AFQP is to give developers confidence that qualified Amazon FreeRTOS ports behave correctly and consistently with each other and to ensure that developers can use Amazon FreeRTOS on their choice of development board. AFQP defines a process that the author of an Amazon FreeRTOS port must follow, and a set of tests that the port must pass, in order for the port to be described as 'qualified by Amazon'. Amazon only distributes and supports Amazon FreeRTOS ports that have passed the qualification program.

It is recommended that Amazon FreeRTOS is only qualified on MCUs that have a minimum processing speed of 25MHz, a minimum of 64K bytes of RAM, and a minimum of 128K bytes of program memory per executable image stored on the MCU. For qualification requirements with over-the-air update (OTA) functionality, two executable images must be stored in program memory at the same time.

The Amazon FreeRTOS Qualification Program will work to benefit MCU vendors and OEM/ODM developers.

• MCU vendors will have the confidence that their MCUs securely connect and interoperate with AWS IoT services.
• OEM/ODM developers will get a reliable and consistent experience across a range of qualified MCU-based development boards, which will allow OEM/ODM developers to focus on the application code for their desired device functionality. OEM/ODM developers will have a simple onboarding experience; they will be able to search and select the relevant hardware and then download the source code with relevant libraries using the Amazon FreeRTOS console.
• Overall, AFQP will accelerate the hardware and software ecosystem, enabling developers to rapidly evaluate, prototype, and productize IoT solutions by abstracting the complexity of embedded development. This approach helps bridge the gap between cloud developers and embedded engineers.