Embedded System Development Process: The Software Design Flow

It is the megatrend in today's digital connected world, each and every personal gadget from palmtop, smart cellular, game set top box, to wearable devices, is getting thinner, lighter, shorter, smaller, and, of course, low power. The global competition and shorter product life cycle post a major challenge to the product development. It is getting harder to meet customer's demands on time because customers want the products to be done as early as possible. The reason is simple: competitions are so high and the technology advances are so fast. Because the time to market is very short for a new product introduction, the development of a new product is often started too hastily, no development plan, do not follow the golden process flow, no thorough reviews, incomplete test cases, waive bugs, etc., so engineers and developers have to repeat what they have done to fix things, in the end everything takes much longer than it should be. A good design flow can reduce time to market; meanwhile improve product's quality. Software development is usually questionable for its poor quality and unreliability. Buggy code, improper interfaces and missing features are almost encountered by the users of most embedded system. The embedded system developers are filled with consequence of missed deadlines, and huge cost overruns. Embedded system developers can benefit from high quality design flow by identifying optimal product architecture and executing a high quality design process. Embedded software development tools are also vitally important for productive development and keeping development in control. The purpose of writing this software design process flow is to ensure that, by following a high quality process and right set of development tools the developers shall possess the highest quality of products while maintaining a competitive schedule and a lower cost structure.Book Contents: Chapter 1: Introductions. Define embedded system and development process.Chapter 2: Describe a time-task span of the embedded system development process. Chapter 3, 4, 5, and 6: Each Chapter describes the four phases of the design and development process respectively, which are plan phase (Chapter 3), design phase (chapter 4), integrated development phase (Chapter 5), design verification and validation phase (Chapter 6). The design phase (Chapter 4) consists of six parallel stages: hardware, firmware, software, ASIC, FPGA, and mechanical (not each stage are required in all embedded system design). In this book, Chapter 4, firmware is considered equivalent to software for embedded system development process. Chapter 4 only deals with software design process, other design stages shall be covered by separate contents. In additional to development process, software design techniques are also discussed in chapter 4 and appendixes.Appendix 1 gives a template for Embedded System Development Plan. Appendix 4 to Appendix 9 provides coding guidelines and software review checklists. Appendix 10 to Appendix 12 lists few popular IDE development tools for the embedded system design.Audience: This book is intentionally written for: Managers and team leaders who need to guide embedded software design and development process.Software engineers and new designers who want to optimize software design and development process.New graduates and students who want to learn software design and development process.Interested readers who want to explore software design and development proce