Development Tools Map the Connected Future

By Barry Manz, Mouser Electronics

As if the design of embedded systems isn't difficult enough, several trends are making it even more challenging. In the high-performance sector, designers must work with complex devices such as FPGAs and quad-core CPUs, and the "small form factor" segment now encompasses subsystems whose end products must fit into another end product the size of a watch. And many have on-board communications capability from Bluetooth, ZigBee, and Wi-Fi, to Ethernet. It's safe to say that without comprehensive evaluation boards and software development kits, few embedded systems today could be designed at all. Fortunately, device manufacturers understand this, as well as the fact that the quality of their support tools can make or break a product.

It's hard not to marvel at what today's high-performance embedded systems can achieve on a single 3U or 6U card. A typical single-board computer or DSP board, for example, can have one or more FPGAs, a quad-core CPU, high-speed, high-resolution, broadband ADCs and DACs, perhaps a discrete graphics engine, and truly enormous amounts of I/O.

At the other end of the spectrum are comprehensive devices like Broadcom's WICED Sense Bluetooth Smart Sensor development kit based on the company's BCM20737S SoC for creating secure embedded wireless networking applications. It has six MEMS Sensors for gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, pressure sensor, humidity, and temperature, a WICED sense tag, USB to MicroUSB cable, links to download sample applications, and development software. The tag's firmware can be updated from a smartphone, tablet or PC. The company says it can "reduce" the design time for Bluetooth app development from months to minutes.

Figure 1: This smartphone app comes with Broadcom's WICED Sense Bluetooth Smart Sensor development kit.

The RF Enigma

The embedded community has also just been tasked with connecting every possible person, place, or thing and has, begrudgingly faced the fact that RF and microwave (i.e., wireless) technology can no longer be considered an outlier. It has become a standard requirement, requiring attention to a domain that the high-brow end of the RF community has long considered anathema. That's not surprising, as the world of "fields and waves" shares little with its digital counterpart, requires different areas of expertise, and can significantly increase the complexity of any device into which it is incorporated. That said, without it many embedded systems would be islands with no connection to the outside world, so RF and microwave technology is begrudgingly accepted as an annoying but necessary evil.

Fortunately for the consumer embedded community, wireless-enabled embedded products are small-signal devices. Their receive-and-transmit electronics are small and don't need to deliver high levels of RF output power that would increase size, burden the batteries of portable host devices, and drive up cost. Entire radios-on-a-chip simplifies matters, but nevertheless requires attention to the vagaries of RF design. The need to embrace not just MIMO but MU-MIMO, frequencies up to 60 GHz, and higher-order modulation schemes like OFDM haven't helped. Nor has the device- and manufacturer-specific nature of hardware development platforms and the enormous programming time (often using multiple tools) required to make the system "work".

Microchip Technology's PIC32 for Bluetooth Starter Kit (Figure 2) that uses its PIC32MX270F256D MCU. Among other things, you get a Bluetooth radio, pushbuttons, Cree multi-color and single-color LEDs, an accelerometer, temperature sensor, onboard debugging, along with Android app, demo code and a serial port profile stack.

Figure 2: Microchip's PIC32 Bluetooth Starter Kit is a low-cost Bluetooth development platform with the essential tools— including software.

Tired of Hearing About IoT? Get Used to It.

The Internet of Things umbrella term may already have worn out its welcome, but it's not going away, and in fact has just begun to emerge as something well beyond its former, far less comprehensive predecessor, called "convergence". Intel, which projects that by 2020, more than 200 billion devices will be connected to each other and the cloud, puts it bluntly: "By 2020 any end-point appliance without integrated gateway functionality (the ability to connect to a source and catalog data over a network) will be largely useless."

To that end, the company has amassed gateway development platforms (Figure 3) for energy and industrial, transportation, and developers in general that incorporate a bewildering array of capabilities. It includes its Quark-branded SoCs designed for applications ranging from industrial systems to wearable devices, Wind River software tools, broad security resources, support for more or less every known wired or wireless communications protocol, and a huge number of other features. Other companies are following suit.

Figure 3: Intel gateway platform is based on its Quark SoCs covers applications from large industrial systems to wearables.

Summary

Embedded system design today is not for the faint of heart, and in some sectors new challenges posed by connecting everything to the Internet (and the cloud) are about to make it even more "interesting". From the perspective of high-performance computing, defense, and other applications, embedded systems benefit from standardized form factors and internal and external communication standards that have evolved over decades, but their design is still enormously challenging.

By comparison, the emerging world of ubiquitous connectivity is the Wild West, driven in some cases by applications that haven't yet been explored and are thus not yet "deployed", the mandatory requirement to incorporate state-of-the-art communications technology in tiny form factors (each one unique), and a slate of new requirements that will challenge designers for a very long time. The good news is that the demand for connectivity has created an entirely new market from the bottom to the top of the food chain, from discrete devices to SoCs, and complete systems.

Barry Manz is president of Manz Communications, Inc., a technical media relations agency he founded in 1987. He has since worked with more than 100 companies in the RF and microwave, defense, test and measurement, semiconductor, embedded systems, lightwave, and other markets. Barry writes articles for print and online trade publications, as well as white papers, application notes, symposium papers, technical references guides, and Web content. He is also a contributing editor for the Journal of Electronic Defense, editor of Military Microwave Digest, co-founder of MilCOTS Digest magazine, and was editor in chief of Microwaves & RF magazine.