UNIT III - Embedded Firmware Development Environment

EE8691 – EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
UNIT – III
EMBEDDED FIRMWARE DEVELOPMENT

ENVIRONMENT
 Embedded Product Development Life Cycle- objectives
 different phases of EDLC
 Modelling of EDLC
 issues in Hardware-software Co-design
 Data Flow Graph, state machine model, Sequential Program
Model, concurrent Model, object oriented Model
UNIT –III
EMBEDDED FIRMWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT
Easwari Engineering College / EIE Page 1

EMBEDDED PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE (EDLC)

EDLC is an Analysis – Design – Implementation based problem solving approach for the
product development.
 Analysis – what product needs to be developed?
 Design – Good approach for building it
 Implementation – To develop it
ESSENTIALITY OF EDLC:
The necessity and importance of EDLC is to understand the scope and complexity of the
work involved in any embedded product development. EDLC defines the interaction and
activities among various groups of a product development sector including project
management, system design & development, system testing, release management & quality
assurance. EDLC standards are needed to design for the product development, which
provides the uniformity in development approaches.
OBJECTIVES OF EDLC:
The aim of any product development is the Marginal benefit. Generally, marginal benefit is
expressed as ―Return on Investment‖ (ROI). The investment for a product development
includes initial investment, manpower investment & infrastructure investment etc.
A developed product needs to be acceptable by the end user that it has to meet the
requirements of the end user in terms of quality, reliability & functionality.
EDLC helps in ensuring all these requirements by following 3 objectives: Ensure that high
quality products are delivered to end user.
Risk minimization & defect prevention in product development through project management
Maximize the productivity
Ensuring High quality for products:
The primary definition of quality in any embedded product development is return on
investment achieved by the product. In order to survive in market, quality is the most
important factor to be taken care of while developing the product.
Qualitative attributes depends on the budget of the product, because budget allocation is
very important.
Budget allocation might have done after analyzing the market, trends & requirements of
product, competition etc.

EDLC must ensure that the development of the product has taken account of all the
quantitative & qualitative attributes of the embedded system.
Risk minimization & defect prevention through management:
The project management is essential in product development and it needed more
significance.
Project management adds an extra cost on the budget but it is essential for ensuring the
development process is going in the right direction and the schedules of the development
activity are meeting.
Projects which are complex and requires timeliness should have a dedicated & skilled
project management part & hence they are said to be ―Highly‖ bounded to project
management.
Project management is essential for predictability, coordination and risk
minimization
The time frame may be expressed in number of person days (PDS) Predictability – Analyze
the time to finish the product.
Coordination – Developers are needed to do the job
Risk management – 1. Backup of resources to overcome critical situation
2. Ensuring defective product is not developed
Increased Productivity:
Productivity is a measure of efficiency as well as Return on Investment. Different ways to
improve the productivity are:
Saving the manpower effort will definitely result increased productivity Use of automated
tools wherever is required
Work which has been done for the previous product can be used, when there is a presence of
similarities between the previous and present product. This is called as ―Re-usable effort‖.
Usage of resource persons with specific set of skills, which exactly matches the
requirements of the product. This reduces the time in training the resource. Example:
resource with expertise in zigbee wireless technology for developing a wireless interface for
the product. This kind of resource does not need training.
Different phases of EDLC

A life cycle of a product development is commonly referred as the ―Model‖ A sample
model contains 5 Phases

 Requirement Analysis
 Design
 Development and test
 Deployment
 Maintenance
Complexity depends on number of phases involved in EDLC
Need:
Any embedded product may evolve as an output of a need. Need may come from an
individual or from public or from company (generally from an end user or client). Need
initiate the concept proposal. The human resource management and funding agency reviews
the concept proposal and provides the approval. Then it goes to a product development team.
The product development need can be visualized in any one of the following three needs.
a) New or Custom Product Development:
The need for a new product which does not exist in the market or a product which acts as a
competitor to an existing product in the current market will lead to the development of
completely new product. Example: Various manufacturers act as competitors in developing
the mobile phones.
b) Product Re-engineering:
The process of making changes in an existing product design and launching it as a new
version is known as re-engineering a product. It is termed as product upgrade. Re-
engineering an existing product comes as a result of the following needs.
Change in business requirements User interface enhancements Technology upgrades
c) Product Maintenance:
The technical support provides to the end user for an existing product in the market is

―Product Maintenance need‖. It has two categories 1. Corrective Maintenance deals with
making corrective actions following a failure or non-functioning. 2. Preventive maintenance
is the scheduled maintenance to avoid the failure or non-functioning of the product.
Conceptualization:
This is the product concept development phase and it begins immediately after a concept
proposal is approved. This phase defines the scope of the concept, performs cost benefit
analysis and feasibility study and prepares project management and risk management plans.
The conceptualization phase involves 2 types of activities namely,
1. Planning Activity
2. Analysis and study Activity
Feasibility study – examines the need for the product and analyses the technical as well as
financial feasibility of the product under construction.

Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) – It examines and total up the equivalent money value of the
benefits and costs of the product under consideration and provide an idea about the
worthwhile of the product. Some principles of CBA are:
1. Common unit of measurement – Marginal profit is expressed in terms of common

currency. Example: Indian Rupee or US dollar
2. Market choice based benefit measurement – value of money
3. Target end users.
Product Scope – deals with what is in scope and what is not in the scope.
Planning Activities – It contains plans for product development. It also contains

recommendation such as
o The product is feasible and proceeds to the next phase of the product life cycle.
o If the Product is not feasible, scrap the product.
Analysis:
Requirement analysis phase provides emphasis on determining ‗what functions must be

performed by the product‘ rather than how to perform those functions.

Analysis and documentation – this activity consolidates the business needs of the product
under development and analyses the purpose of the product. The various requirement are:
o Functional Capabilities
o Operational and non-operational quality parameters
o Data Requirements
o User manuals
o Operational requirements
o Maintenance requirements
Interface Definition And Documentation – This activity should clearly analyze on the
physical interface as well as data exchange through the interfaces and should document it. It
is for proper flow of data throughout the life cycle.
Defining test plan and Procedures – Master test plan consist of various type of testing in a
product development. They are: Unit testing, Integration testing and System testing.
Design:
This deals with the entire design of the product taking the requirements into consideration
and focuses on how the functionalities can be delivered. Preliminary design consists of the
list are,
Inputs and Outputs are defined here
Product will look like a black box
Preliminary design document is sent for review to the client.
After the client review, detailed design architecture is generated.
This design also needs to be reviewed and get approved by the end user.

Development and testing:
Development phase transforms the design into realizable product. Design is transformed into
hardware and firmware.
Look and feel of the device is very important.
Testing phase can be divided into,
 Unit Testing – independent testing of Hardware and firmware
 Integration Testing - testing after integrating Hardware and firmware
 System Testing – Testing of whole system on functionality and non-functionality

basis
 User acceptance testing – testing of the product against the criteria mentioned by the
end user or client.
 Test reports. Deployment:
A process of launching fully functional model into the market is called deployment. It is also
known as first customer shipping. The essential tasks performed during the deployment phase
are,  Notification of product deployment
 Execution of training plan
 Product installation
 Product Post – Implementation Review
Support:
This deals with the operation and maintenance of the product. Support should be providing to
the end user to fix the bugs of the product. The various activities involved in the support
phase are:
 Setup a dedicated support wing. Example: Customer Care.
 Identification of bugs and Areas of improvement.
Upgrades:
It deals with
 Releasing of new version for the product which is already exist in the market.
 Releasing of major bug fixes. (Firmware up gradation)
Retirement/Disposal:
Everything in the world changes, the technology you feel as the most advanced and best
today may not be the same tomorrow. Due to this reason, the product cannot sustain for a
long time in the market. It has to be disposed on right time before it causes the loss. The
disposition of the product is essential due to the following reason.
1. Rapid technological advancements.
2. Increased user needs.
MODELLING OF EDLC: (EDLC APPROACHES) : The various approaches in

modelling the EDLC are:
Linear or water fall model:
In this model, each phase of EDLC is executed in sequence and the flow is unidirectional
with output of one phase serving as the input to the next phase. The feedback of each
pulse is available locally and only after they are executed.

 Review mechanisms are employed to ensure that the process flow in right direction.
 Bugs are not fixed immediately and they are postponed to support phase.
Advantages:
 Rich documentation
 Easy project management
 Good control over cost & schedule
Drawbacks:
 Analysis can be done without any design
 Risk analysis is performed only once throughout the development
 Bugs are fixed only at support phase
Iterative / Incremental / Fountain EDLC Model:
The iterative model can be viewed as a cascaded series of linear models.
Do some analysis, follow some design, the some implementation, evaluate it and based on
short comings, cycle back through and conduct more analysis, opt for new design and
implementation.
Repeat the cycles until the requirements are met.
The incremental model is a superset of iterative model where the requirements are known at
the beginning.

Advantages:
 Feedback is at each function. So each cycle can act as a maintenance phase for
previous cycle
 Risk is spread across each individual cycle and can be minimized easily
 Project management as well as testing is much simpler to the linear model
 Product development can be stopped at any stage
Drawbacks:
 Extensive review requirement at each cycle
 Training is required for each new deployment at the end of each development cycle.
Prototyping / Evolutionary Model:
 This model is similar to the iterative model and the product is developed in multiple
cycles
 The only difference is the model produces more refined prototype of the product at
each cycle instead of just adding the functionality at each cycle like in interval model
 The short comings of the protomodel after each cycle are evaluated and it is fixed in
the next cycle

 After the initial requirement analysis, design is made and development process is
started. Then this prototype is sent to the customer for evaluation. The customer provides the
feedback to the developer for further improvement.
 Then the developer repeat the process with some additional features and finally
delivered to the outside world
Advantages:
 Feedback after each implementation and fire tuning is also possible
 By using the prototype model, the risk is spread across each proto development cycle
& it is under control
Drawbacks:
 Deviations from expected cost and schedule due to requirements refinement.
 Increased project management
 Minimal documentation on each prototype may create problems in backward

prototype traceability
 Increased configuration management activities
Spiral Model:
 Spiral model is best suited for the development of complex embedded products &
situations where the requirements are changing from customer side
 Risk evaluation in each stage helps in reducing risk

 Spiral model is best suited for the development of complex

embedded products & situations where the requirements are
changing from customer side
 Risk evaluation in each stage helps in reducing risk
 It is the combination of linear & prototype models to give the best
possible risk minimized EDLC model. The activities in the spiral
model present in the 4
quadrants are:
o Determine objectives, alternatives, constraints
o Evaluate alternatives, identity & resolve risks
o Develop & test
o Plan
Fundamental issues in Hardware-Software co-design:
The meeting of system-level objectives by exploiting the trade-offs between

hardware
and software in a system through their concurrent design
Key concepts
o Concurrent: hardware and software developed at the same
time on parallel paths
o Integrated: interaction between hardware and software
developments to produce designs that meet performance criteria and
functional specifications Fundamental issues:
The problem statement is hardware software co-design and its issues.
Some of the issues are:
Selecting the model:
 A model is a formal system consisting of objects & composition
rules. It is hard to make a decision on which model should be followed in
a particular system design
 Models are used for capturing & describing the system
characteristics
Designers switch between a variety of models, because the objective varies
with each phase
Selecting the architecture:

The architecture specifies how a system is going to implement in terms of the number
& types of different components and the interconnection among them. Some type of
architecture falls into application specific architecture class, while others fall into
either general purpose architecture class or parallel processing class. The commonly
used architectures is system design are:
1. The controller Architecture – implements the finite state machine
model using a state register holds the present state and the combinational circuits
holds the next state & output
2. The data path architecture – suitable for implementing the data flow
graph model. A datapath represents a channel between the input and output. The
datapath contains registers, counters, memories & ports. Ports connect the datapath to
multiple buses.
3. The finite state machine datapath – this architecture combines the
controller architecture with datapath architecture. The controller generates the control
input, whereas the datapath processes the data.
4. The complex instruction set computing (CISC) – this architecture
uses an instruction set for solving complex operations. The use of a single complex
instruction in place of multiple simple instructions greatly reduces the program
memory access & program memory size requirement. On the other hand, Reduced
Instruction Set Computing (RISC) architecture uses the multiple RISC instructions to
perform a complex operation. RISC architecture supports extensive pipelining
5. The Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) – this architecture
implements functional units in the datapath
6. Parallel processing architecture – implements multiple concurrent
processing elements and each processing element may associate a datapath containing
register & local memory. Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) & Multiple
Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) architectures are examples for parallel processing
architecture. SIMD – eg: Reconfigurable process, MIMD – eg: Multiprocessor
systems
Selecting the language:
A programming language captures a ‗Computational Model‘ and maps it into
architecture. A model can be captured using multiple programming languages like C,
C++, C#, Java, etc. for software implementations and languages like VHOL, system
C, verilog, etc. for hardware implementations. C++ is a good language for capturing
an object oriented model.
COMPUTATIONAL MODELS IN EMBEDDED DESIGN

The commonly used computational models in embedded system design are
(i) Data flow graph model(DFG):
This model translates the data processing requirement into a data flow graph. It is a
data model. This model emphasis on the data and operations on the data which
transforms the Input data to output data. In DFG model, Data is represented by a
circle data flow is represented arrows.An inward arrow to the process denotes the
output data. Data driven Embedded are modeled using DFG.

A DFG model is said to be either acyclic DFG (does not contain multiple
input values & multiple output values) or non-acyclic DFG (output is
feedback to the input).
(i) State machine model:
The state machine model explains the system behaviours with states,
events, actions and transitions. The representation of a state is current
situation. An event is an input to the state. The event acts as stimulus for
state transition. The activity evolved in state machine is action. This
model is used for event driven embedded systems. Eg: control and
industrial applications.
A Finite State Machine (FSM) model is one in which the number of states
are finite. Consider the FSM model for automatic seat belt warning system
as an example.
Motor control software design is another example for state machine model.

(iii)Sequential Program Model:
The functions are executed in a sequential order, which is same as the conventional
procedural programming. The program instructions are iterated and executed with condition
and the data gets transformed through a series of operations. The tools for sequential program
model are FSM & flowcharts. Consider an example ‗Seat Belt warning system‘
programming.
# define ON 1 # define OFF 0 # define YES 1 # define NO 0
Void seatbelt_caution ()
Waiting ( );
If (checkIgnition ( ) = = ON)
If (checkseat belt ( ) = = OFF)
SetTimes (3); Start Alarm ( );
While ((check seat belt ( ) = = OFF) && (check Ignition ( ) = = OFF) &&(Timer Expire ( )
= = NO));
Stop Alarm ( );

Flow chart Approach:
(ii) Concurrent Process model:

This model executes the processes concurrently. It is easier to implement
than the conventional sequential execution. Sequential execution leads to
poor processor utilization. Concurrent processing model requires
additional overheads in task scheduling, task synchronization and
communication. Now consider the example of seat belt warning system
in concurrent processing model. We can split the tasks into:
1. Timer task for waiting 10 seconds
2. Task for checking the ignition key status
3. Task for checking the seat belt status
4. Task for starting & stopping the alarm
5. Alarm timer task
for waiting 3 seconds
These tasks are needed to
synchronize.

Figure: Concurrent Processing program model for seat belt warning

system.
The concurrent processing model is commonly used for the
modeling of real time system.
(iii) Object – oriented model:
 It is an object based model
 It splits the complex software requirement into well defined pieces
called objects
 It brings re-usability, maintainability & productivity in system
design
 Each object is characterized by a set of unique behavior & state.
A class is an abstract of a set of objects.
 A class represents the state of an object through member variables
and object behaviorthrough member functions.
 The member variables can be public, private or protected
 Private member access within the class and public member access
within the class as well as outside the class.

 The concept of object & class brings abstraction, holding and

protection.

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EE8691 – EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

EMBEDDED FIRMWARE DEVELOPMENT

 Embedded Product Development Life Cycle- objectives

 different phases of EDLC

 issues in Hardware-software Co-design

 Data Flow Graph, state machine model, Sequential Program

Model, concurrent Model, object oriented Model

EMBEDDED FIRMWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

Easwari Engineering College / EIE Page 1

EMBEDDED PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE (EDLC)

Easwari Engineering College / EIE Page 2

Different phases of EDLC

Easwari Engineering College / EIE Page 3

Easwari Engineering College / EIE Page 4

The conceptualization phase involves 2 types of activities namely,

2. Analysis and study Activity

Easwari Engineering College / EIE Page 5

1. Common unit of measurement – Marginal profit is expressed in terms of common

2. Market choice based benefit measurement – value of money

3. Target end users.

Planning Activities – It contains plans for product development. It also contains

o If the Product is not feasible, scrap the product.

Requirement analysis phase provides emphasis on determining ‗what functions must be

Easwari Engineering College / EIE Page 6

o Operational and non-operational quality parameters

Inputs and Outputs are defined here

Product will look like a black box

Preliminary design document is sent for review to the client.

After the client review, detailed design architecture is generated.

Easwari Engineering College / EIE Page 7

Development and testing:

Look and feel of the device is very important.

Testing phase can be divided into,

 Unit Testing – independent testing of Hardware and firmware

 Integration Testing - testing after integrating Hardware and firmware

 System Testing – Testing of whole system on functionality and non-functionality

 Test reports. Deployment:

 Execution of training plan

 Product Post – Implementation Review

 Setup a dedicated support wing. Example: Customer Care.

 Identification of bugs and Areas of improvement.

 Releasing of major bug fixes. (Firmware up gradation)

1. Rapid technological advancements.

2. Increased user needs.

MODELLING OF EDLC: (EDLC APPROACHES) : The various approaches in

Linear or water fall model:

Easwari Engineering College / EIE Page 9

 Easy project management

 Good control over cost & schedule

 Analysis can be done without any design

 Risk analysis is performed only once throughout the development

 Bugs are fixed only at support phase

Iterative / Incremental / Fountain EDLC Model:

The iterative model can be viewed as a cascaded series of linear models.

Repeat the cycles until the requirements are met.

Easwari Engineering College / EIE Page 10

 Project management as well as testing is much simpler to the linear model

 Product development can be stopped at any stage

 Extensive review requirement at each cycle