Guest Editor's Introduction: Design Tools for Embedded Systems

0740-7475/00/$10.00 © 2000 IEEE April–June 2000 More and more products we buy contain electronics, including phones, cars, entertainment equipment, and toys. Unlike in computers, the electronics used in these applications are deeply embedded and must interact with the user and the real world through sensors and actuators. Embedded electronic systems are often highly distributed, and the parts must collaborate to implement a complete application. Because of performance and cost pressures, embedded systems are built using a wide variety of techniques, including software, firmware, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), general-purpose or domain-specific processors, core-based ASICs, Application-Specific Instruction-Set Processors, memory, field-programmable gate arrays, analog circuits, and sensors. The design of complex embedded systems is a difficult problem, requiring designers with skills and experience to identify the best solution. Designers have had little assistance from electronic design automation tools to perform such tasks. Most system designers must work in an ad hoc manner, at least partly because many products are enhancements of existing systems. There are no widely accepted methodologies or tools available to support the designer in the definition of a functional specification and the subsequent mapping phase onto a target architecture. Therefore, designers usually rely on manual techniques, mainly driven by experience, allowing them to explore only a limited set of alternative solution architectures. An exception is represented by digital signal processing systems, for which there are a longer design tradition and better tools supporting their development. The rapid evolution of most markets in telecommunications, multimedia, and consumer electronics has added to the pressure on design time. Furthermore, as huge consumer volumes drive down prices, embedded system designers look to the semiconductor industry to integrate functionality up to the system level through new multiprocessor architectures. Design aspects such as low power, architecture exploration, and high-level specification will become essential for producing application-targeted systems-on-chip. Market forces are forcing system design time to be reduced and the design made rapidly adaptable, while always improving the cost, performance, and functionality. Embedded system designers have therefore shifted most of the system functionality to software, with dedicated hardware sparingly used for only the highest performance fixed functionality. This evolution requires a careful choice of target architecture in terms of size, functionality, and performance and a careful management of the entire design process. A concurrent design process is necessary to try to balance the conflicting requirements that complicate embedded system design. Such a concurrent design process requires collaboration between several development teams: the system architects, the software developers, and the hardware designers. A good methodology is required to shorten overall design time by overlapping activities in all these areas and, most Guest Editor’s Introduction: Design Tools for Embedded Systems