Embedded System development can be done with a simple collection of tools

Embedded System software components

 I’ve discussed the Embedded System software components that are on the board. A cross-compiler is part of the development environment and, in the most basic terms, produces code that runs on a different processor or operating system than where the compiler ran. For example, a compiler that runs on a Linux x86 host that produces code to execute on an ARM9 target is a cross-compiler. Another example is a compiler running on Windows that produces code that runs on a x86 Linux host. In both cases, the compiler doesn’t produce binaries that can be executed on the machine where the compiler ran.

 In Linux, the cross-compiler is frequently referred to as a tool chain because it’s a confederation of tools that work together to produce an executable: the compiler, assembler, and linker. The debugger is a separate Embedded System software component. The article later describes how to obtain or create a tool chain for your target processor based on the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) project.

Embedded System development can be done with a simple collection of tools. This article covers the most frequently used tools so you can understand what they do and how they fit into an embedded system. This article covers each of these in great detail, to provide terra firma on which to stand if you’re new to the world of embedded development. One of the most confusing aspects of embedded Linux is that there are many interrelated tools, it’s difficult to talk about any one in isolation. This is just a subset of the tools used during any development project, but it represents the bare minimum subset. Most projects of any consequence use a variety of tools in addition to the ones mentioned.

SystemVue is not the only tool on the market with these capabilities. The Mathworks offers Link to Code Composer Studio and Real Time Workshop that work with MATLAB and Simulink to support similar types of Embedded System development. National Instruments also provides a similar solution with their Lab VIEW product.

The specific tool used in this paper is Agilent’s SystemVue® Comms ESL development SW. SystemVue has a powerful set of mathematical, functional and signal processing tokens, or models, that can be used to construct the block diagram of the desired radio architecture. Once constructed, an engineer can simulate performance of the architecture in both floating point and fixed point representations, debugging performance and fixed-point precision issues along the way. SystemVue then directly generates ANSI-C or VHDL source code. This lets the engineer download and test the radio Embedded System software in a variety of Texas Instruments' digital signal processors or FPGA platforms.