Emerging trends in embedded space

BANGALORE, INDIA: If it wasn't for embedded technologies, we wouldn't be using our mobile phones for sending and receiving emails, checking word documents, and carrying our presentations on it.

If it wasn't for embedded, we wouldn't be listening to theatre quality audio on the move, watching HD movies on a train, and navigating our way on a live map fitted in our car. Embedded tech has completely changed the way we work, live, and enjoy.

In this story, we will try to throw some light on future and current trends of this industry covering domains like embedded hardware, software, databases and operating systems.

Multicore

With the need for efficient processing increasing every day, the major way to increase processing power was to increase frequency. Now as frequency increased from 5MHz to 3GHz, the power consumption increased which resulted in heavy heat dissipation. Then came the intelligent idea of putting multiple processing units on a single chip.

Multi-core processors take advantage of relationships between power and frequency, both cores share power and work on same frequency. This gives a very high performance boost. Programming models used by multicore processors at this time are SMP, loosely coupled multiprocessing and AMP. SMP stands for symmetric multiprocessing.

In this model, with the help of operating system along with algorithms, dynamic load balancing of tasks submitted for processing is done. In loosely coupled multiprocessing approach that is very popular in cell phone designs, different cores are assigned different tasks. Finally AMP (asymmetric multiprocessing) is a kind of hybrid of above two models in this approach. Some load balancing is done like SMP along with task assignment to cores (like loosely coupled). Greatest advantage of this model for embedded system developer is maximum utilization of resources and scalability.

Embedded Virtualization

The other buzz word at this point in embedded world is virtualization. As we all know virtualization is a means of maximizing resource utilization. For example by vitalizing your server, one can run multiple servers on a single piece of server hardware, this not only saves hardware resources but also power consumption and time.

In embedded domain the future of virtualization is in microkernel development. Microkernel is OS kernel that does not provide OS services but provides minimum or only essential mechanism required to implement those services. Here services include address-space management, thread management and inter process communication.

Given minimalistic design approach and light weight user space drivers, microkernels are widely deployed and ideal for embedded virtualization.

SoC

System on Chip (SoC) is an integration of computer components on a single chip. It has hardware components along with software components (that controls the microprocessor and peripherals). SoC is everywhere from your mobile phones to portable media players and demand for enhanced functionality of these devices is pushing SoC designers to build more powerful SoCs. Latest SoCs feature CPU running at above 500MHz.

The other advances in embedded domain are in embedded database and search. Embedded database is a software component that is part of the application, not a separate running application. Its operations are invoked by the application.

Another way to look at it is that embedded databases are embedded within an application. In networking and telecommunication domain, ATCA (Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture) is future trend. AdvancedTCA is a series of industry standard specifications for the next generation of carrier grade communications equipment.

What lies in future of embedded system are low energy consuming small form factor equipments that can be upgraded with minimum efforts. This is why embedded systems are moving towards open source.