WinZent Technologies AB is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. They make a BIOS and an operating system for 32-bit Intel systems. According to their LinkedIn page, they were founded in 2013 and have 11-50 employees. Their OS is called “wIOS” (WinZent Instant OS). Their BIOS is called “wION” (WinZent Instant ON BIOS) — the B for BIOS is silent :-). Their code is written in assembler, not C, and is focused on performance and size. The binary image of their BIOS is apparently less than 64KB. Their OS is 116KB, targets 32-bit systems, and has FAT32 support.
Some fun quotes from a 2014 embedded presentation WinZent gave:
“UEFI very complex and bloated.”
“coreboot is basically Linux.”
“Linux is complex and bloated.”
They have a video of their BIOS loading in 1second, with an AMI BIOS taking about 8 seconds.
http://winzenttech.com/AdlinkwIONvsAMI.html
“WinZent’s software has a footprint small enough to execute in the cache memory which is 1500 times faster than the DRAM memory extensively used by other BIOS and general purpose OS, such as Linux, OSX and Windows.”
If you have a MinnowBoard MAX — or a Terasic DE2i-150 — you can get a BIOS from them to try out.
The BIOS uses ACPI version 2. ACPI version 6.1 was released last week.
Their BIOS does NOT use Intel FSP. I don’t have the URL or quote handy, but on the Minnowboard or eLinux list in the past, someone from WinZent mentioned this.
The BIOS targets Intel x86 systems, specifically “ATOM, Silverthorn, Diamondville, Cedarview, Pineview, Lincroft, and CloverTrail.”. Unclear about the newer Intel 32-bit boards systems.
They claim their BIOS works with “all operating systems”, which is too vague to be useful. They mention Microsoft Windows 7-10, Linux, and Android.
I see no references to any security features. If speed and size are your only concerns, WinZent sounds excellent. If you have security concerns, then you might consider something else.
There are multiple PDFs to read more about their technology:
http://winzenttech.com/Tech.html
http://winzenttech.com/wION.html
http://winzenttech.com/wIOS.html
Click to access wION%20Tech%20Spec.pdf
http://winzenttech.com/Media.html
https://www.linkedin.com/company/winzent-technologies-ab
Firmware Security 