Embedded systems seen evolving into 'Device Software'

In two recent years, ‘life-cycle management’ strategies have emerged with a variety of makers of development tools, software testing companies and database vendors. However, the idea of providing a kit of tools and technologies intended for handling all the aspects of application planning, development, and deployment remained far behind the world of embedded software development, where special-purpose tools is the rule.

‘To tell the truth, embedded development industry lagged behind in this area,’ says a marketing officer. ‘But there is observed a germinal shift taking place in this market. It’s a drastic change, and it is conditioned by modifications to programs developed by our customers. As of current situation – it is not sufficient to provide a kind of real-time OS and some development tools.

This California based company is notorious as the provider of embedded OS which was installed to the rover sent to explore Mars.

People think that the thing is about hardware – something like software embedded into hardware. But this is the wrong point of view to this industry now. In fact the question is about device software. The increasing amount of our customers utilize this term, this is conditioned by the fact that in more and more cases people first think of software but then about hardware.

Currently, software is the feature that differentiates products and solutions. Hardware has become a commodity. Purchasing a new car, customers no longer compare speed characteristics, disc brakes or torque. They compare on-board GPS systems, cruise controls under-the-hood diagnostics. Since device software shades the device itself, it begins to play more essential role.

Chasing the accelerating complexity and escalating connectivity, device software evolved from several hundred lines of code to thousands, and thus changed the very nature of this segment of market.

To keep the pace with latest technologies and provide consumers with solutions capable of coping with all these changes, was designed a new architecture, an embedded software development kit intended to refine the whole development and support life-cycle.

New solution is based on Eclipse 3.0 framework to act as a ‘general-purpose platform’ which reintegrates standardized development platforms to refine all stages of embedded software development process. As it is Eclipse-based it is able to accept Eclipse plugins. Authors claim that this is the first and only development kit in the domain of embedded software to encompass multiple operation systems.

This workbench is intended for every software engineer engaged on the project. It is for people trying to bring a chip up live on a board. It is for debugging and modification of kernel. And ultimately, it is for application developers doing some software development. It is implemented to become end-to-end solution along the whole lifecycle.’