Software Platform for Embedded Software Development

Abstract

The demands for new embedded system products that provide new functionality and adopting new hardware are booming. Parallel development in hardware and software is promising in reducing both the time and effort for the design of embedded system. Mostly, the development of embedded system application has been carried out on general purpose computing platform using cross target development tools, includes cross compiler and linker etc. Personal computers are used as cross development environment to host the embedded system software development tool set. We propose a software platform approach that promotes the role of PC based embedded software cross development platform to support the embedded software development even before the real hardware becomes available. Our approach is a tunable embedded software development platform (TESDP) that facilitates more extensive usage of the development platform. TESDP helps in decoupling the hardware and software development while maintaining very close semantic similarity for the function operates on both development and target platforms. We demonstrate the feasibility of the TESDP approach with the development of two embedded systems, a car-borne modular mobile data terminal (MMDT), and an air-borne navigation support display (NSD) system. MMDT provides data communication and global positioning capability for applications in the domain of intelligent transportation system (ITS). NSD is an important component in avionics systems that provides pilot with graphical flight instrument information to support aircraft navigation.