Virtualization and Componentization in Embedded Systems—And how it will change the way you engineer

The mobile and CE marketplace is experiencing a rapid evolution towards user-customizable, open software environments with a greater demand on security, reliability, performance, time-to-market, and BOM costs than ever before. These demands create severe challenges in the engineering of embedded systems. We must change the way we engineer, and we must engineer the change.

Virtualization and componentization provide unique capabilities to system designers, device manufacturers, and software developers to overcome these challenges. Existing solutions in the marketplace, however, employ virtualization techniques transplanted from the enterprise server market which fail under the unique constraints of embedded systems. An effective solution must combine the advantages of both virtualization and componentization in a system specifically engineered for these constraints.