System-level development of embedded software

Abstract

Embedded software plays an increasingly important role in implementing modern embedded systems. Development of embedded software, and of hardware-dependent software in particular, is challenging due to the tight integration with the underlying hardware architecture. In this paper, we describe our system-level design approach that allows designers to develop software in form of a platform-agnostic specification. Our design environment enables exploration of different architectural alternatives and subsequently generates the software implementation. It generates the application code, communication drivers, and an adaptation to a chosen RTOS. It completes the process by producing the final target binary for each processor. Our experimental results demonstrate the automatic generation of the binaries for five control and media oriented applications.