Related Work and Contemporary Approaches

Abstract

Traditionally, hand crafted solutions, multi-threading libraries [Schwan 91] or real-time operating systems [Ramamritham 94] have been used as backends at the lowest level to solve the software embedding problem in the software design of embedded systems. Additionally, new methodologies are emerging from the CAD domain in the field of hardware/software co-design. These techniques are part of what we have called the ‘processor architecture integration’ step, which is needed for integration of behavior distributed over different custom or general-purpose processor half-way the system design script (Section 4.1). They focus on providing a more integrated approach to the simultaneous design of both hardware and software. Finally, an overwhelming amount of work exists focusing on the ‘task concurrency management’ (i.e. task scheduling), typically originating from a software background; however, at the highest level in the system design script, they can be re-used for both software and hardware.

“The fundamental aspects of real-time embedded software are often not well understood by designers in a design community which is traditionally hardware oriented ...”

—[anonymous]