On Target: Embedded Systems

IVI Systems Increasingly Critical to Vehicle Differentiation

Leading vendors ramping up focus on solutions for IVI applications

In a recent webcast together with IBM Rational, VDC discussed the mounting complexity of automotive applications – specifically electronic control units (ECUs) such as engine control modules – and how these systems have played an expanded role in enabling automotive manufacturers to equip their vehicles with the features necessary to differentiate themselves from the competition. Beyond ECUs, another differentiator that has increasingly come into focus in the last several years is the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system.

To serve this growing trend, leading embedded software vendors such as Mentor Graphics, Microsoft, MontaVista Software, QNX Software Systems, and Wind River have all dedicated significant resources – both technical and marketing – to their solutions for IVI applications. The momentum behind the GENIVI Alliance has further solidified the importance of IVI systems, which can provide a customized user experience through enhanced communication, navigation, and other audio/video entertainment functionality.

Perhaps indicative of the longer software development cycles needed to develop and refine the innovative features found in today’s IVI systems, data from VDC’s 2011 Embedded Engineering Survey shows that the duration of these projects was on average two months longer than what was estimated for under-the-hood applications such as braking systems and transmission controls. This is also echoed in responses estimating the percentage of the total development cost of these projects that is related to software development, for which respondents developing IVI applications indicated a greater percentage than did those developing other types of automotive systems.

Will the project length and software development cost for these applications decline as the relevant software solutions mature and initiatives such as those governed by the GENIVI Alliance gain adoption, or is the nature of IVI projects such that development timelines and expenses will always be more significant than for other automotive applications?

VDC investigates this and other vertical market specific trends from across the embedded landscape in our upcoming report, Vertical Markets & Applications, from our 2011 Embedded Software & Tools Market Intelligence Service. This study will provide an analysis of individual vertical market standards, trends, current and emerging practices, and analysis of select applications within the following vertical markets:

• Automotive/rail/transportation
• Consumer electronics
• Industrial automation
• Medical devices
• Military/aerospace
• Mobile phones
• Office/business automation
• Retail automation
• Telecom/datacom

Please contact us for more information.

How is the Evolution of Automotive System Requirements Impacting OEM Tooling Strategies?

In recent years, automotive systems have grown increasingly complex as electronic control units define a greater percentage of vehicle functionality and end-product differentiation. This evolution has placed a significant strain on the efficacy of traditional development methodologies and tools. As a result, an increasing premium is being placed on tools that offer means to accelerate and/or automate portions of the design and development process going forward. In support of and in parallel to this trend, the use cases for lifecycle management tools such as modeling tools has continued to expand as advances in functionality can now support the variability in software and system architecture and construction.

In addition, the aforementioned system complexity – combined with omnipresent time-to-market considerations – are now driving more engineering organizations to indentify new ways to streamline overall system development across different project/subunit teams. Subsequently, there is an increasing need for engineering organization to be able to visualize, group, and understand the relationships between disparate sets of software/system IP assets. This can be supported by advanced tooling that allows for code/system visualization as a way to understand code structure, system functionality, and third-party content.

Webcast Tomorrow, November 15th:

We will be exploring the these trends in greater depth and discussing some of our relevant research findings during a webcast with IBM Rational tomorrow Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET.

To register, please visit the following link:

https://www.techwebonlineevents.com/ars/eventregistration.do?mode=eventreg&F=1003713&K=6DJ

Medical Devices Segment within Multicore Components & Tools Market Expected to Double by 2013

 

Industry’s considerable market opportunities highlighted in VDC’s 2011 Multicore Components & Tools Report

Intensifying graphical and high-definition imaging demands of ultrasound equipment, x-ray systems, and various patient monitoring devices have continued to promote the adoption of multicore processors in medical devices. Furthermore, the increasing mobility requirements of many medical devices have also served to drive interest in multicore due to its ability to satisfy specifications around light weight, low power consumption, and low heat dissipation.

VDC estimates that the commercial market for solutions powering devices in this sector reached nearly $16 million in 2010, a total expected to swell to more than $32 million by the end of the forecast period in 2013. However, because a myriad of these devices require FDA and other relevant certifications – and thus many OEMs remain concerned that the complexities of multicore might impede the certification process – these figures could be influenced (positively or negatively) by the aggressiveness with which OEMs transition to multicore in devices where certifications are required.

This recently completed research covers the global market – including market size and forecast; segmentations by product category, industry, and geographic region; and competitive market share – for software solutions for device/system development incorporating multicore processors, specifically including:

• Real-time and non real-time operating systems;
• Software development tools;
• Software and system modeling tools;
• Virtualization solutions;
• Communication/protocol/middleware stacks for multicore systems; and
• Other related products and services.

This report also includes select data cuts generated from our 2011 Embedded Engineering Survey, which had 870 total respondents.

For further information about VDC’s 2011 Multicore Components & Tools report, please contact Bob Perugini, Account Director, at 508.653.9000 ext. 144, or via email at rperugini@vdcresearch.com. 

 

Can the Use of Multicore Processors Really Double in Two Years?

Or will the same old challenges continue to impede the adoption of this technology?

In recent years, as embedded systems – and the software within them – have become increasingly complex, the emergence and adoption of multicore processors in the embedded space has been a trend closely followed by industry participants. Thus far the transition to multicore has been a slow one, with only 16% of engineers responding to VDC’s 2011 Embedded Engineering Survey indicating they were currently working on a project that incorporated a multicore processor. Looking forward two years, however, engineers expect that ratio to more than double.

Clearly, semiconductor vendors have collectively made multicore processors more widely available, technologically capable, and affordable today than they were several years ago. Similarly, operating system suppliers such as Enea, Green Hills Software, LynuxWorks, QNX Software Systems, and Wind River have continually introduced innovative multicore functionality to their OS solutions and development tools, in an effort to bridge the gap between the potential of multicore chips and the functionality of multicore-aware software platforms.

What remains unclear is whether or not these developers have access to – or fully understand the capabilities of – the tools necessary to enable a transition from a single core, serial processing environment to one in which multiple threads are executing simultaneously on multiple cores. This, of course, has been the key question surrounding multicore for at least two years. VDC believes that the complications associated with parallel programming (particularly with regard to transitioning legacy serial code to a multicore system) remain among the primary challenges silicon vendors and software suppliers must address before the adoption of multicore can reach its tipping point in embedded.

Must leading software development tools vendors such as Lauterbach and ARM continue to make significant improvements to the functionality of their tools for multicore development, or are greater efforts around engineer training and education more important at this point in time? How important are the roles of tools for software modeling, dynamic system design, and test automation with regard to addressing engineers’ concerns with parallel programming? Has anything really changed with regard to the factors affecting the adoption of multicore in the last couple of years?

VDC investigates this and other trends in our upcoming report, Multicore Components & Tools, from our 2011 Embedded Software & Tools Market Intelligence Service. Please contact us for more information.

 

Setting Some Real Limits Around Real-Time

What Happened?

Last week at the ARM TechCon conference, Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows Embedded Compact, expected to be released in June of 2012, will be updated with improved real-time performance and a smaller footprint.

VDC’s View

In the recent past, we have often discussed how the increasing amount of system resources available within many embedded systems has facilitated the adoption of larger footprint operating systems in many application classes once served by traditional real-time OSs. The significant presence of Windows “Enterprise” SKUs (restricted licenses of Microsoft’s desktop or server OSs) in the embedded market has typified this trend.

Windows 8’s planned support for the ARM architecture should only strengthen the relevance of these desktop SKUs to many engineering teams given ARM’s broader and faster-growing use within the embedded market as compared to x86. So if Microsoft’s Enterprise SKUs do suddenly gain wider utility, can we expect Microsoft to maintain as diverse and stratified of a portfolio of embedded OSs as they have now?

The answer in the long term is most likely no, so perhaps the greater question is how many and what SKUs remain? Will there be a need for multiple componentized versions? Will Handheld (formerly Windows Mobile 6.x) be rolled back into its parent Embedded Compact (CE)?

If nothing else, Microsoft’s announcement of its plans for Windows Embedded Compact reinforces their intentions to at least maintain two threads of offerings for ARM-based designs in the near term. But what are the implications of Compact's enhanced "real-time" support?

Microsoft has always pitted the CE family as supporting real-time requirements. Traditionally, however, there has always been a substantial stratification of the RTOS space based on the varying "hardness" of real-time requirements for different application classes. As you can see from the chart below, the presence of real-time requirements is far from a binary dynamic and, as a result, the decision to use one OS over another is not always clear cut.

 

So one lingering question remains: Does this announcement mean Microsoft is squaring up to compete more directly with the likes of Wind River and Green Hills Software who have traditionally focused on the "hard" real-time application classes  - or is the announcement simply intended to differentiate Compact from other Microsoft offerings as their evolution dissolves some of the traditional boundaries that catalyzed CE's original creation and niche?