The wild west: conquest of complex hardware-dependent software design

ABSTRACT

Embedded SW design can be compared to the lawless wild west. With no clear methodology and no standard multi core platform modeling environment every company has to improvise its own solution. The problems facing embedded software users are becoming more complex since:

• Hardware platforms become very complicated with many heterogeneous processors, complicated memory structure and interconnect

• Multiple platform configurations and platform migrations drive an explosion of the number of version that need to be developed/maintained/ported

• Processors are becoming very complicated and hard to program

• Semiconductor vendors can not justify the investment required to provide a complete Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), RTOS, etc.

• It is hard to put together an embedded software development environment (platform model + HAL + development tools)

• The speed required for efficient software development is very high

This panel composed of experts in the problem and solution domains will discuss the current problems and potential solutions.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Domain-specific architectures

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Languages, Performance, Reliability, Standardization, Theory, Verification

Keywords:
ESL, MPSoC, hardware-dependent software, heterogeneous/homogenous multi-core, many-core, multi-core, multiprocessors, programming model, symmetric/asymmetric multi-core, virtual platform, virtual prototyping, virtualization