Embedded systems

Embedded computer systems must be fast and efficient. A European consortium has created a new modelling framework that lets designers strike the best balance between static, reconfigurable and analogue hardware and the software that runs on it.

A typical desktop PC contains an all-purpose processor and many different software programs that allow it to do a huge range of tasks. It gets things done, not always as efficiently as possible, but well enough for most purposes.

Embedded systems are different. These specialised computers can be found everywhere from aircraft to cars to washing machines. They are built to do one job extremely well, and usually that means that a lot of processing work which might be done in software on a normal computer is done by a purpose-made – and efficient – hardware chip.

The trick is to get the right balance between software and hardware. “Software is flexible, but it requires fast and expensive processors and can be too slow for very computation-intensive tasks,” says Frank Oppenheimer, of the OFFIS research centre in Oldenburg. “Hardware in embedded systems is efficient but usually static – that is, a piece of hardware can be used in exactly one specific way.”

In recent years industrial designers have become interested in dynamically reconfigurable hardware. It comes in programmable modules which can rewire themselves to do different tasks, so combining the processing muscle of hardware with the flexibility of software.