BANGALORE, INDIA: Embedded systems are becoming more common as engineers throughout many industries are placing more and more intelligence onto devices. You can find embedded processors in objects such as shoes, phones, toasters, and automobiles and being able to develop high-quality and optimized designs are becoming much more difficult.

With so many engineers needing embedded technologies and so few having embedded expertise, the search is on for new tools that can bring embedded technology to an order of magnitude more engineers. Think of it as finding the next “Indian Idol.” You have a few classes of tools that are trying to win the hearts and minds of engineers across this land:

* Traditional text-based embedded tools that are attempting to simplify the design process by providing reference designs
* IP vendors that are selling tested and packaged IP blocks for use in traditional system design tools
* Graphical system-level design tools that are providing higher levels of abstraction to design embedded systems

Engineers such as machine builders and automotive experts understand the mathematics or processes required for their systems, but they lack knowledge of low-level embedded development tools and semantics.  Helping these domain experts over this hurdle requires the last approach mentioned above, graphical system design.

Graphical system design is a revolutionary approach to embedded design that blends intuitive graphical programming and flexible commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware to help engineers and scientists more efficiently design, prototype, and deploy embedded systems. With the graphical system design approach, you can use a single environment for all design stages to increase productivity, save money, and bring embedded technology to the domain expert.

Graphical programming for designing embedded systems
Many embedded systems run autonomously and must execute multiple tasks in parallel with specific timing requirements. Consider a machine control system that needs to control a linear stage, rotate multiple shafts, control lighting, and read in video data. In a system such as this, there are multiple processes that must happen deterministically, in real time, and in parallel. When using traditional text-based programming languages, complexity expands exponentially as you add in the necessary components of an embedded system. 

Let’s consider a comparison of a graphical (LabVIEW) versus a text-based (C) approach to creating an embedded application.  When creating a simple single-task application, it is relatively simple to write an application in C or in graphical code making it a choice of personal preference at this level.  However, as soon as we start adding complexity, the productivity benefits of a graphical abstraction begin to emerge.

Figure 1 shows two parallel loops that are acquiring data and sending that data over a network.  Even with two simple processes running concurrently, the graphical approach automatically abstracts the system complexity.

The loops shown continue to add sophistication by incorporating hardware timing with a built-in Timed Loop structure – a semantic that natively represents time and concurrency.  At this point, the text code is obviously a barrier to a broader audience where the graphical representation is simply much more clear and accessible to scientists and engineers.

This graphical representation is clear and accessible to a broad range of domain experts, enabling them to design systems with complex timing and parallelism. In contrast, many of these domain experts lack the expertise to implement this complexity using traditional text-based approaches.