Chip Makers Target Internet of Things Complexity

Embedded developers know the pain of software complexity. Missed deadlines, cost overruns, and lost sleep are the all-too-familiar outcomes.

Lately, though, semiconductor makers have grown more serious about wanting to help. More than ever, they're talking about tools, middleware, and software frameworks aimed at making the embedded development process easier. Their hope is that they can free up the developers, enabling them to focus less on integration issues and more on the differentiation of their end products.

"In the old days, engineers were expected to do the whole thing from top to bottom," Jack Ganssle, embedded consultant and founder of The Ganssle Group, told Design News. "Today, managers don't have the patience for that. They want their engineers to immediately start generating application-level code."

That's why manufacturers of embedded processors are stepping in. They want to take ownership of some of the technical issues, thereby removing the burden from time-strapped embedded developers. If their latest concepts are successful, embedded developers will have a pre-integrated foundation, onto which they can lay their application software.

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"The big challenge has always been the integration," said Vin D'Agostino, vice president of engineering and marketing at Renesas, which recently rolled out a platform known as Synergy to help developers with those issues. "We said, 'What would happen if we automated the ability for engineers to integrate all the little pieces they need to build up the base of their product?' That way, they could move forward and build their applications on top of that platform."

Synergy attacks the problem by incorporating those "little pieces" -- some in silicon, some at board level, and a lot in the software code. It pre-integrates drivers, communication stacks, operating systems, and an application framework, all within an integrated development environment targeted at Renesas Synergy processors. Renesas engineers say that, unlike many industry predecessors, the platform is different in that the 'little pieces" include software code that's pre-certified to work inter-operatively.

Similarly, Freescale recently announced that it is rolling out its Intelligent Sensing Framework (ISF) 2.1, which incorporates the Processor Expert tool to help engineers create sensor-based applications for its Kinetis MCUs. The platform is said to simplify the process of creating sensor-based applications for home, medical, consumer, and industrial products.

Freescale engineers say such solutions are critical for a broad swath of the embedded developer population. "There are more embedded programmers than there are people familiar with sensors," Ian Chen, marketing manager for Freescale's Sensor Solutions Division, told us. "So we're aiming this at someone who's doing something with sensors, but wants to reduce the adoption hurdles."

The emphasis on sensors make such platforms a good fit for the Internet of Things (IoT). From an engineering perspective, IoT applications may be almost indistinguishable from traditional embedded apps, but they are likely to be great in number and heavily sensor-based. And as those numbers grow, they could expose a widespread industry weakness -- many embedded designers simply don't have the expertise needed to make those applications happen.

"You may be an expert on the vibration signature of your sump pump, but that doesn't mean you know anything about the gazillion or so IoT protocols that are coming out now," said Chen.

Indeed, the truth is that most developers have their hands full just marrying a few sensors to even the simplest microcontrollers. It's not unusual for such microcontrollers to be accompanied by data sheets that number in the thousands of pages, says Ganssle. "The real problem is that the MCUs can be hideously complicated," he told us. "Some of the onboard peripherals can have hundreds of control registers and every bit has to be set properly. It takes an awful lot of time to do that."

That's why Renesas says it packed Synergy with integrated solutions, including an operating system with a real-time kernel, and specialized software for TCP/IP, USB, color graphics, DSP, touch, security, and safety. The package also includes a hardware abstraction layer, application framework, and a load of software APIs.

From the vendor perspective, the goal is simple: Supply enough pre-installed plumbing so that engineers are further down the road when they launch their development cycle. "If you're not getting all those components from the same place, then you're going to spend your time downloading, configuring, and worrying about the way it all works," D'Agostino said. "There's a lot of stuff that can come back to bite you if you don't know what to look for."

The key, of course, is whether the new breed of embedded platforms works as expected. Development engineers who have been burned by inadequate reference designs are legion -- and the true test will be whether they quickly gravitate toward platforms such as Freescale's Intelligent Sensing Frame work or Renesas' Synergy.

If they do, it could be a huge win, not just for the MCU vendors, but also for the embedded development community. "We're taking the tedious work out of the development," D'Agostino said. "And in the process, we're enabling the engineers who are designing a product to do what they do best."

Senior technical editor Chuck Murray has been writing about technology for 31 years. He joined Design News in 1987, and has covered electronics, automation, fluid power, and autos.

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