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| The Design Challenge and Market Trends of Embedded |
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In the past, most researching activities in the pc industry were mainly focused on the desktop or laptop pc. But the development of the new technology and social demand has been making companies to shift their sight to environmental intelligent system, which is a kind of embedding system that can sense, obey and react to instructions.
As the fast developing of the IC design technology, the central processing unit (CPU) is becoming cheaper and cheaper. Many electronic wares are embedded with CPU and become a so-called embedded systems. According to the estimation of Mr. Sandeep K Shukla from Virginia Technology Company, the number of CPUs used in embedded system is 30 times of the number used in PCs.
Obviously there is a need to change the focus of system research work, that is to change from the general system to the dedicated system and from performance to robustness, usability, safety, auto control, extensibility, function, versatility, cost, size, power saving and manageability.
The embedded system is comprised of the special hardware and a programmable compenent which is used to interact with the hardware.. It usually includes software, hardware and a special system with certain communication channels. It is generally used as a part of a large system and realized by using the system of chip (SoC). In this way the software provides functions and versatility, the hardware provides the performance. Today embedded systems have been used in every sectors of the industry, from home appliances to the navigator of missiles and spacecrafts. Here the following discussed the design challenge and the market trend of the embedded systems.
The Challenge for Design
It is not only difficult but also very mistakable to design a software for an embedded system which can run smoothly and make fast real time decision. Many of this kind of system are key systems, high robustness, good quality of service and strict power consumption are needed. All these factors make the design company very difficult to figure out embedded systems in different levels according to different using environment. Further, when designing embedded systems the design difficulty exponentially increases as the complexity increases, and the production efficiency of the design engineers are dramatically decreased. So, the design company need a robust design process which can guarantee correct design or provide means to verify the design, so that all the design schemes satisfy the limitations.
Therefore the design method of embedded system involves many aspects, such as, modeling for the embed system to satisfy the functional or non-functional demands; separating the model into hardware part and software part so as to satisfy the demand for performance; meanwhile the cost, power consumption and other factors shall be optimized. And the model shall be verified and tested from other related aspects. All these challenges s shall be properly considered when designing embedded systems.
Parallel designing the hardware and software is a key challenge for embedded system design. The main problem is how to synchronize and integrate the hardware and software design, which demands consistent and correct control for the designing process, and this is time-consuming. At present the industry of embedded systems has developed Pols, Cosyma, Chinook and many other methods and tools to support integrated hardware and software developing, their target is to provide a uniform developing method for both hardware and software, which supports spatial searching and reusable for both hardware and software.
Predicating the resource demand for an embedded system is very important task, because the engineer will use the figures to verify if the embedded system can run within the limited resource and time. For the hardware real-time embedded system, the most important factor which shall be considered seriously is ??the Worst Circumstance Execution Time??, as it determines if the system can satisfy the time limits. INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique), a French Institute, is carrying a research work so as to calculate the application execution time on a certain hardware platform. INRIA has developed a tool which can calculate WCET for different CPU and different programming language.
Java??s good independence to hardware platforms makes it an ideal tool for embedded system. First, Java is independent of hardware platforms so it has a good transplantability. It can dramatically reduce the application development cost. As Java can run on any system, so the application can be developed on desktop PC instead of the target hardware platform. Secondly, Java supports dynamic loading of applications, which is helpful for the wireless application of PDA. But Java also has shortcomings, it needs enough system resource to run. These resources include memory, execution time and power consumption, also these are the main limitiation of embedded systems. Cooperated with TI, one of the developing teams of INRIA has developed an Java virtue machine so as to provide an high performance platform for Java embedded system.
Market trends
All EDA suppliers have all issued some embedded system design environment, such as Co-Centric System Studio of Synopsys, VCC (Virtue Component Co-design) of Cadence and CoWare N2C of Coware etc. Many Universities of the World have also developed many design tools for embedded system design, but all these tools are too specific and can be only used in limited specific application environment. In this area there is no single total solution. The only method which is suitable for embedded system design is the point tools based on excellent design methodology. Now, the industry is carrying research work on methodology development and point tools development, because they need to be improved both.
Embedded systems can be used in all industries, for example, astronautics, military, manufacturing, medical care, internet, consumable electronics and telecommunication equipments. The market of embedded systems can be divided into following four parts: Embedded software; Embedded CPU ( which can be further divided into micro-controller, micro-processor and digital signal processor (DSP)); Embedded memory ( for example, all sorts of RAM, ROM and flash memory); and Embedded computer cards.
The market for embedded memory will increase highly in the next three years, and the market for embedded software, embedded CPU and embedded cards will also increase after it.
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| Hoply Technology Co.,Ltd |
| Add:21E,Haiyi,Huijinghaoyuan,HI-Tech Park,Nanshan,Shenzhen, |
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