Multi-core processors gain weight in system design

BANGALORE, INDIA: As India is now positioned as one of the preferred destinations for companies for embedded design and development, Mohan Hebbar, vice president of Embedded Systems and Software at Symphony Services shares his experience on Indian Embedded design industry and talks about the way forward for developer community.

CIOL: Could you brief our readers about the role of embedded systems at Symphony Services and the areas that the company is targeting at?

Mohan Hebbar: Embedded software is one of the key growth areas for Symphony Services and is a logical extension of the company’s product engineering focus. Just as product engineering requires specialized expertise and focus, embedded software development requires similar capabilities and organizational DNA. Replicating our success from product engineering services for ISVs to embedded is the right growth strategy for Symphony Services.

We plan to expand into embedded space to tap the huge market opportunity in this segment. We provide complete embedded software product development services in communication, semiconductors, automotive, consumer electronics, and has initiatives in the medical devices and energy devices space.

CIOL: Can you elaborate on the importance of embedded design in the industry and how new technologies are helping designers to increase productivity?

MH: The importance of embedded systems is growing at a very rapid pace in all domains as it offers great opportunities to enhance the usability of systems and makes it possible to have smarter, connected and feature-rich products.

The embedded systems industry was born with the invention of microcontrollers and since then it has evolved into various forms, from designing for machine control applications to other new verticals with the convergence of communications. With a lot of functionalities being added, the need for high performance in embedded systems has become inevitable and so developers are increasingly leaning towards multi-core processors in their systems design decision.

Another recent development is that chip suppliers are now making and marketing new chips aimed at specific markets. For instance, Intel launched an embedded processor aimed at the Point of Sale terminal and other retail computing applications. Intel's Celeron CPU is extensively being applied to new IP STB designs.

CIOL: How software product engineering success provides the platform to take outsourced embedded software and systems development to the next level?

MH: The mantra of product engineering success is to build deployable products or solutions into the market and align them with ever-changing product road-maps. To manage product engineering services that enable clients’ success, a tremendous amount of detailing and process discipline is called for. In outsourced embedded software and system development, product detailing from use case elicitation to production testing is no different from software product engineering discipline.

By virtue of being engaged with product companies, we have a strong product DNA. This has enabled us to chalk out and tread the path of success in outsourced embedded space as well.

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CIOL: Which are the platforms that Symphony Services working on embedded software development across proprietary or industry standard real-time operation systems (RTOS)?

MH: Symphony Services works on various silicon platforms provided by tier-1 & tier-2 silicon vendors. As in software, we have the requisite competency and has engaged with various technologies - from proprietary RTOS, non-OS firmware to industry popular RTOS.

Symphony Services has a strong capability in user interaction design which is becoming more and more as a standard requirement in most of the devices that are visual driven. We also build and offer embedded capabilities in communication infrastructure requirements at middleware and driver level requirements.

CIOL: How development systems differ for embedded systems?

MH: The key differences in developing embedded systems are the understanding of platforms and to some extent the application domain, that could vary from wireless (WiFi, WiMAX, BlueTooth, RFID, NFC) to streaming of media streams to managing various formats of images. When we look at embedded systems at the platform level, a significant amount of hardware behavior awareness is a must.

In a typical embedded system, especially in case of devices that go to market fast (and vanish from market fast as well), a fast turnaround of demos having the WOW effect becomes significantly important and one needs to have a very close interaction with clients for their needs; this requires a sizeable amount of process discipline that we excels in.

CIOL: Power consumption is an important issue in embedded systems. Components that consume more power need cooling, so some type of fan must be attached to the system. How Symphony services is addressing this issue?

MH: We are working with tier-1 semiconductor vendors, designing unique solutions for a given SOC to manage the power consumptions in its various modes, such as, active, stand-by, and idle mode to increase the battery life.

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CIOL: Programming for embedded systems plays an important role since embedded systems programmers don’t have the luxury of even one extra line of code, keeping memory and storage in mind. How engineers/developers at Symphony are trying to address this?

MH: Managing the memory foot print is a challenge, though not a significant one compared to what it was five years ago; with memory size increasing and associated cost reducing to a manageable level.

However, the design methods have changed due to increase in varieties of efficient memory modules like on chip memory, on board flash and pluggable flash memory and we have variety of flash memories available that can be chosen for different kind of applications.

We are adopting a practiced approach, starts solutions from requirement elicitations and puts in a significant amount of time into design of the product before going into coding stage. This approach helps in profiling the memory usage much faster during integration phase; essentially, the emphasis is on defect prevention. 

CIOL: How do you look at the embedded market in India and what are the trends that you see in the market today?

MH: The Indian embedded design industry has come of age and is of a significant size. The presence of multinational companies, growth of Indian services companies, establishment of product design centers and a huge domestic market have together created an interesting ecosystem. Companies in India have moved up the value chain from mere project execution to end-to-end development of products. India is now positioned as one of the preferred destinations for companies for embedded design and development.

The future of embedded software looks bright given the exceeding pressure on US companies for time-to market and cost. Indian companies are investing in infrastructure and building domain expertise. IP creation will lead to royalty-based models as well as high-end expertise in specific domains in the embedded software value chain. Having a local manufacturing ecosystem will also boost this industry with end-to-end product development and roll-out happening from India. There will be a strong focus on increasing margins and adopting business models which are not linearly dependent on the manpower.