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Embedded Design During Chip Shortages

Dave Hughes - TUXERA - Watch Now - Duration: 28:05

In these modern times of chip shortages, the need for flexibility and portability in the design of embedded products has been pushed to center stage. There are three main factors that tie your development to a particular microcontroller: the RTOS, the toolchain, and the peripheral controllers. This presentation describes the embedded development practices Tuxera uses to free users of microcontroller dependency, in order to make their software solutions portable – an absolute must for an embedded software company. Your product expertise should not be held hostage to the global supply chain problems. By making good design decisions early in the development process you can make it easier to move to alternative architectures when unexpected supply chain issues appear.
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Andreas-J
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | no reply

Hi Dave, it was a real pleasure listening to your talk, getting insights and and hear about your experience on SW Portability/Abstratction/... . I really appreciate you taking the time to share all this and giving us those really valuable tools and thoughts for our engineering tool-box.
There's on more thing you made me curious about and it would be great to hear your opinion/experience: During the the Q&A you made a very interesting statement about communications protocols - that THE critical part of the design is how you move the Data.
Do you have some more tipps for designing/developing a performant communication protocols? What to watch for? What are the trapps and pittfalls to avoid? Abstraction best practices?
Since I am currently working on designing a specific middleware, so to say a highlevel protocol, you hit a sweet spot with that comment :-)
I am really looking forward to hear some more of your ideas!
Thanks, Andreas

zerorunn3r
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | no reply

Excellent!

CMiller
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | 1 reply

Thank you for your talk, Dave. An excellent discussion. I'd appreciate the slides for reference as well.

DaveHughesSpeaker
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | no reply

thank you for your kind words - i have forwarded your request - you should get a response soon...

Dave

glennk
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | no reply

Abstracting the RTOS was the most interesting section, that is one area I didn't consider for chip shortages! Thanks for sharing your knowledge in that area.

DanR
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | 1 reply

Thank you Dave, for your presentation. Will you be publishing your slides here?
I've pitched a similar framework before -- before 'Supply Chain Issues' was a thing -- so your talk is resonating well with me. Thank you for your consideration.

DaveHughesSpeaker
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | no reply

Hi Dan, Thanks - our marketing team will contact you soon about how to get the slides.
Dave

Andreas-J
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | 1 reply

Hi Nathan, I really liked the talk! Thank you very much!
One initiative achieving a level of abstraction for ARM is CMSIS - what is your experience with /take on CMSIS?
Andreas

DaveHughesSpeaker
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | no reply

Hi Andreas, I think we covered this a bit in the live Q&A - but in short - if you are wedded to ARM (or more accurately the supported Cortex types) - then it is a very comprehensive abstraction and as long as you can get conformant drivers for your target it must be an important option. For us it did not work because we needed our components to run on any architecture - but we have abstractions to CMSIS (and in particular the RTOS) for our components.

Nathan3
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | 1 reply

Thanks for the presentation, very interesting.
At my company we are seeing more and more customers asking us to port their firmware to new microcontrollers. The difficulty of those migration projects highly depend on the abstraction you describe in your video.
Also, could you publish the slides ?

DaveHughes
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | no reply

hi Nathan, I have forwarded this request to our marketing team - they should be in touch soon.
Thanks for listening!

Dave

CarlesMarsal
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | 1 reply

Very interesting talk!
I think pretty much everybody today is minimally aware of the risks associated with non-portable code and some basic strategies like a set of primary software design principles, and the use of language usage constraints like MISRA. Today, however, with the increasing shortage problems, these risks have become more probable than ever,. and developing without minimum portability in mind is pretty much suicidal. In addition, the rise of embedded software complexity and off-the-shelf software and development ecosystems provided by silicon vendors with a certain degree of lock-in provides a lot more of coupling surface increasing the effort of making it portable, making careful planning and designing more necessary than ever.
What I enjoyed most about the talk though is the ability to structure and summarize the main challenging aspects and tactics to overcome them with success that the talk is able to distill.

DaveHughes
Score: 0 | 2 years ago | no reply

Thank you or your kind words and your thoughts - much appreciated!
Dave

pintert3
Score: 1 | 2 years ago | no reply

Well-said Dave. Very good guidelines to follow that could save many projects from all the different kinds of crises that could cause a need to change MCUs to meet demand.

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