Step Up to C for Embedded R&D

Guy Bois, Director, GRM2 Laboratory
EETimes (9/27/2013 09:52 AM EDT)

We are all eager to lower the cost of embedded system design, while increasing quality and decreasing time-to-market. However, as embedded systems become more complex and sophisticated, the traditional design process is taking up too much time. It is simply not agile enough to achieve the results as rapidly as we need.

Since the 1990s, efforts to improve the R&D of embedded systems using hardware/software co-design have yielded limited co-development processes. The R&D has tended to center on specific types of hardware design, and still with separate departmental teams involved; hardware and software. As a result, prototypes still require an integration phase, along with the risks that this process incurs, and multiple coding languages are used, resulting in a constant need for recoding.

The starting point for a more agile approach to development is to work at a higher level of abstraction, in this case, ESL, or electronic system level.

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