Power-efficient, long-lasting wearables: how Suunto improved system performance with Tuxera

Suunto, the Finnish maker of premium sports watches, set out to build a next-generation wearable platform that delivers:

• Fast and responsive user experience
• Reliable access to performance data for aspiring and professional athletes
• Dual-memory architecture to balance power efficiency with data availability

The goal was to create a high-end platform that could support Suunto’s long product lifecycles while meeting the performance expectations of competitive users.

Navigating the complexities of dual-memory design

To meet its performance and power requirements, Suunto’s architecture used:

• NOR flash for short-term, low-power storage of UI assets and recent logs
• eMMC for long-term data storage, including data like maps and old exercise records

However, this introduced key challenges:

• Slow erase operations on NOR flash that affected responsiveness
• Complicated data flow, requiring regular transfers of logs from NOR to eMMC

These issues directly impacted user experience and introduced engineering overhead.

“We faced some challenges with the actual usage of NOR. For example, the erasing of chip blocks was quite slow with NOR flash memories. The idle erase support by Tuxera was really valuable for us in optimizing the data storage access performance.” Mikko Hiltunen, Head of Embedded Software at Suunto.

Accelerating performance with Tuxera’s embedded file system

Suunto selected Tuxera’s embedded file system stack to streamline storage operations and improve system responsiveness. Tuxera’s solution offered:

• Out-of-the-box support for both NOR and eMMC
• Idle erase support that improved NOR flash performance by 80-100x
• Minimal integration effort, accelerating development timelines
• Faster access to records without the need for complex custom logic
• “The cost of developing our own file system stack is massive, in the range of 6-7 figures considering the development, implementation, testing and optimization. Once Tuxera solved our challenges, we wanted to keep the stack for next major platform rebuilds.” Mikko Hiltunen, Head of Embedded Software at Suunto.

Enabling a scalable and modular platform for future growth

With Tuxera’s technology at the core, Suunto launched a modular and scalable platform for its professional sports watch lineup. The impact:

• Faster time to market, thanks to simplified integration
• Improved system performance, especially for data-heavy use cases
• Greater engineering efficiency, allowing teams to focus on user-facing features while Tuxera managed data flows

As a result, a high-performance wearable platform was developed to evolve with future product generations. This allowed Suunto to align platform design with performance and time-to-market goals.

Like Suunto, if you’re looking to boost the performance and responsiveness of your wearables, Tuxera can help. Let’s talk about how our embedded file systems can accelerate your next product launch.