Hidetoshi Kambe

Use of Student Experiments for Teaching Embedded Software Development Including HW/SW Co-Design

Embedded systems have been applied widely, not only to consumer products and industrial machines, but also to new applications such as ubiquitous or sensor networking. The increasing role of software (SW) in embedded system development has caused a great demand for embedded SW engineers, and university education for embedded SW engineering has become important. The embedded software engineers should learn system architecture design and hardware (HW) technologies as well as SW technologies. However, only a few universities offer education courses for embedded software engineering that include system architecture design and HW technologies. This paper proposes a student experiment method that is designed to nurture embedded SW engineers by teaching these technologies. The proposed method includes an experiment for embedded SW development, an experiment for embedded HW development and a HW/SW co-design experiment, which help students learn system architecture design skills such as system modeling, HW/SW tradeoff design, and SW and HW module design. A model of each experiment was developed and evaluated.

A Student Experiment Method for Learning the Basics of Embedded Software Development Including HW/SW Co-design

The applications of embedded system are widespread in not only consumer products and industrial machines but also new applications such as ubiquitous networking or sensor networking. There is a great demand for embedded software engineers in the enterprises, and the education of embedded software engineering in university has become important. The embedded software engineers should acquire both hardware (HW) and software (SW) technologies. We propose a student experiment method to nurture embedded SW engineers who understand HW technologies. The method includes embedded SW and HW design experiments, and a HW/SW co-design experiment. The method helps students learn about system modeling, HW/SW trade-off design as well as SW and HW design. We developed these experiments and evaluated them.

Study on binary code synchronization in consumer devices

This paper presents the technology for fast code synchronization or reprogramming method during the testing and debugging phases in the development of consumer devices. The increasing number of features in cellular phones, car navigation systems, and other consumer devices has made it difficult to release bug-free devices. Software for these types of consumer devices has to be developed and tested using a cross-platform simulator. However, many cases have to be considered while using the target devices during testing, making several debugging phases and software update releases inevitable. These processes have to be performed iteratively. Therefore, the time required for the binary code to download to the target devices should be small. In this paper, we propose a fast synchronization or reprogramming algorithm for these types of consumer devices.

A Method of Visualizing Inter-Module Relations to Support Reuse-Based Embedded Software Development

The demand for embedded software is growing, and the number of development steps tends to increase with shorter period for development. It becomes inevitable to re-use existing software resources. However, if the configuration management of the existing software for reuse is not sufficient, it becomes hard to predict which modules in a system would be affected by the reused software modules. This may result in generating new bugs in the system. In this paper, we propose a method to accomplish the effective reuse of software modules by managing dependency information among modules. The method analyzes mutual relations among existing modules and visually presents not only inter-module dependency but also a list of reusable modules based on the developers demand. We evaluated the method by applying it to some actual developments.