Over the years, embedded development tools seem to deliver more capabilities at lower price points. Over the years, $40,000+ development workstations and $10,000+ in-circuit emulators have given way to tools that are lower in cost and more capable. Compilers can produce production quality code in record compilation times by arming the compilation activity across a networked farm of workstations with available processing bandwidth. IDE’s (integrated development environments) greatly improve the productivity of developers by seamlessly automating the process of switching between editing and debugging software on a workstation and target system. Even stepping through software execution backwards to track down the source of difficult bugs has been possible for several years.
The tools available today make it a good time to be an embedded developer. But can the tools be even better? We are fast approaching the end of one year and the beginning of the next, and this often marks an opportunity to propose your wish items for the department or project budget. When I meet with development tool providers, I always ask what directions they are pushing their future tools development. In this case, I am looking for something that goes beyond faster and more towards assisting the developer with analyzing their system.
One tool capability that I would like to see more of is a simulator/profiler feedback based compiler tool that enables you to quickly explore many different ways to partition your system across multiple processors. Embedded systems have been using multiple processors in the same design for decades, but I think the trend is accelerating to include even more processors (even in the same package) than before to squeeze out costs and energy efficiency as well as to handle increasingly complex operating scenarios.
This partition exploration tool goes beyond those current tools that perform multiple compilations with various compiler switches and presents you with a code size versus performance trade-off. This tool should help developers understand how a particular partitioning approach will or will not affect the performance and robustness of a design. Better yet, the tool would assist in automating how to explore different partitioning approaches so that developers could explore dozens (or more) partitioning implementations instead of the small handful that can be done on today’s tight schedules with an expert effectively doing the analysis by hand. I suspect this type of capability would provide a much needed productivity boost for developers to handle the growing complexity of tomorrow’s applications.
Is there an embedded development tool that lifts your productivity to new heights such that you would recommend to your management that every member of your team had it? Is there a capability you wish your development tools had that isn’t quite available yet? What are the top one to three development tools you would recommend as must-have for embedded developers?
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