Programming outside the box

Programming outside the box
Embedded developers are under increasing pressure to resolve the programming issues that accompany the demand for more complexity, higher reliability and better connectivity.

In this In Focus report on programming and languages, contributors make their cases, in print and online, for thinking outside the box when programming and developing embedded systems. Not only must new methodologies be applied, the authors argue, but entirely new languages need to be developed to make sure that all elements in a system are defined and modeled as effectively as possible. Here is what these contributors have to say:

• Zilog Corp.'s Dick Jensen details the programming of an XML-capable, Web-enabled embedded device, a microcontroller that supports dynamic Web pages and control communications over a network via TCP/IP. Simply put, the increasingly widespread inclusion in embedded processors of built-in hardware for XML Web support is changing the way engineers approach the design process.

• Applied Micro Circuits Corp. contributors offer an optimized approach to embedded network-processing development. They discuss an ideal solution that would place the burden of complex algorithm partitioning and load balancing on the programming environment instead of the programmer. But ever-increasing "wire-speed" performance and scalability requirements in those environments typically call for the use of multiple-processor architectures, which can significantly increase the complexity of programming.

• P-Cube Ltd. contributor Opher Reviv talks about the unique challenges his company faced in creating a high-performance, yet flexible, traffic inspection and control device. To solve those problems, P-Cube developed the Service Management Language.

• SpeechWorks author Roberto Pieraccini details the way embedded multimodal systems adopt speech, visual and haptic interfaces as their primary modes of interaction, and tells how to program those systems.

• McObject LLC's Stephen T. Graves contends that the potential to create an application programming interface that catches a much wider range of programming mistakes, and reduces the API learning curve to boot, is built into the C++ and C languages.

• Two ChipWrights software gurus describe an application example of programming an MPEG-4 encoder on an embedded parallel DSP.

• Finally, two authors from Analog Devices Inc. urge developers to carefully consider when to use cache and when to apply direct memory access in embedded media processors.